The Analogy of Being

Still one follower

2012-02-16T14:54:00.000-06:00

This weblog still has one what Blogger.com calls a "follower". Even though I have not posted anything new for quite some time. I have no idea who this "follower" but do applaud him or her for his or her loyalty and say to this one "follower" of mine, "Repent, the end is nigh!" Otherwise, I won't rapture him (or her).

Letter to Professor Evans (or what I think of Ethics Professors)

2011-08-21T00:20:00.001-05:00

February 26, 1997

Dear Professor,

I wish we could have continued the lively discussion on Breaking the Waves that we had nearly two weeks ago because I wanted to ask you why an atheist like you would
a) let himself be so angered by the film as you apparently were and
b) have any sympathies with Bess McNeill at all.

Before I explain my reasons for asking such questions, I want to be clear that, although you have been incautious enough as to reveal your atheism to me, you may, nevertheless, be confident that your secret is safe; I won't blow your cover to your undergrads, and you may continue to bewitch them with that ambiguity of which you are so very proud, you theological Janus, you. Come to think of it, perhaps your desire to have half of your students suppose you a theist and the other half the exact opposite was the ultimate reason behind your decision not to assign this film to your class. You perhaps feared that if you assigned this film, the class would take this as your endorsement of Director Von Trier's bell-ringing. This would explain your dislike of the final scene, which indeed wipes away all traces of agnosticism as to Bess's end. The final scene forces you to believe that Bess's faith in God was right, if, that is, you want to accept this fairy tale, which one can believe or dismiss as hocus pocus just like any other fairy tale. So, my suggestion that your assigning this film would dispel all doubt in your class's collective mind as to what you believe is surely wrong. Had you assigned it, you, no doubt, would have put in a disclaimer as to the extreme dubiousness of fairy tales, thereby safeguarding your highly prized secret. No, you refuse to assign this film because you merely think the film is not worth seeing, much less worth assigning.

Well, no, you don't "merely" think this, do you? This film angers you, and something that is "merely" thought of surely cannot provoke something that is so forceful and violent as anger, can it? I would not imagine so. This brings me, after a rather long digression (I do apologise quite humbly for the digression), to the heart of this letter, or part of the heart, at least, namely to my first question: Why would this film anger you? If I understand you correctly, the utterly unambiguous unsubtle end of the film angered you. That God at the end of the film unequivocally rewards and celebrates such a degrading and preposterous sacrifice of the self as Bess's sacrifice is so ridiculous, so outrageous, so ungeheuerlich that it could not but be an affront to your sense of Rationality, Ethics, and the Good.

But why let that anger you? The film is merely a fairy tale. Lots of mad things happen in fairy tales that go against our reasonable grasp of reality. In one fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, for instance, a devout and pious family slowly (and presumably painfully) bleeds to death because God has willed it so. We can just say simply that this is a fairy tale and, as such, has nothing, nothing at all to do with our reasonable grasp of reality (and we all know what this is, especially those of us who have read many books and attended many years of university to firm up this grasp)--and that would be that. But things are a whole lot different if we believe the fairy tale or even if we have only the slightest twinge of a feeling that maybe, just maybe this fairy tale does have something to do with reality, in which case we are forced to re-assess our reasonable grasp thereof. We have to ask ourselves such questions as, if God is good, why would He will such a horrible death on such a good family? This question would lead us only to more painful questions like, do we even know what the good is, and this would perhaps smack us up against a most horrible suggestion, namely that perhaps our reasonable grasp of reality for all its reasonableness does not help us to understand anything at all. All this would, I imagine, be an insult to all of us who are very proud and confident of our reasonable grasp of reality, especially to those of us who have endured years and years of study just to make this reasonable grasp tighter and more secure.

But an insult can only sting if it comes from someone you put trust in. The trust gives rise to expectations or pleasantness which the insult frustrates. If there are no such expectations, then the insult loses its power. Now, you saw Breaking the Waves on the strength of my recommendation and did not like the film one bit. Your animus should be directed at me for having made you see such a worthless film but not at the film for I was the one who violated your trust and not the film, unless, of course, you did put some trust in the film. Of course, you could say that you transferred your trust in me to the film, but logic would still dictate that you should be angry with me, the primary repository of your trust, and not the film, which can only be secondary in this regard. But never once did you say something like, "You, Paul, made me waste three hours of my precious time with this utterly worthless and pointless film, and, therefore, I am pissed off at you." No, you said that this film "pissed me off." So, perhaps, I am wrong in assuming that you thought this film utterly "worthless and pointless". No, obviously you thought the film had some worth or some potential for worth that somehow was destroyed for you by the end. Otherwise, you would not be so angry with it. In other words, the film let you down.

Yes, the film let you down; I won't back down from this statement. The film let you down because it wasn't true to its, to use your phrase, "authentic core", and this you have admitted to be a tragedy. How odd then that this film with its bell-ringing happy ending should let you down because it did not end in tragedy. As odd as it sounds, I will, nevertheless, not back down from my claim: the film did let you down. And I think I know why.

This leads me finally to another part of the heart of this unfortunately rambling letter, namely to my second question: why do you sympathise with Bess at all? You could simply regard her as a pathetic, gullible naif, nay, you could regard her as insane, as schizophrenic--as the good Ms. Goodman [the student who reviewed the film in Stud Life] does--and the film would trouble your rationality not. You refuse to do so because, I believe, you see in Bess the epitome of Kant's good will, of Kant's good heart.

Yes, that's it! Bess's good heart is what you admire. If only it could be harnessed by the mighty power of the Categorical Imperative, if only Pure Reason could universalise it for our world, think what would happen, my dear Professor! Finally alle Menschen werden Brueder under Bess's gentle smile! Cold, callous Indifference and petty Selfishness would cease! The warming fire of Generosity would light up the night! Hunger would no longer embarrass us! And War would be as insignificant as historical dates in a schoolboy's lazy mind! Bess's abundant, overflowing, wild love, if only it could be controlled by our reasonable Ethical Theories, oh, would that not be the fulfillment of every wet dream of every Ethics Professor in this world! Nietzsche's deepest wish would come true: we would make Caesars with the souls of Christ.

But, my dear Professor, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. Bess's good heart as Christ's soul is not of this world. This, I suggest, is what let you down. This is what angers you. Bess's good heart belongs to God, and you resent that it does because you want it for this your world. If you can't have it, then no one can, not Jan, and certainly not God, Who by your lights does not even exist. You will assert that the "authentic core" of Bess's story is a tragedy because for you it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy because your dearly held Ethics has suffered an unrecoverable loss, the loss of the only thing that can make it work, a good heart. And you rather mourn this loss, you rather mourn the lost potential of what might have been than suspend your disbelief, if only for a moment, for a fairy tale and share the miraculous joy that this good heart is not lost at all but borne to eternal life. But, of course, this good heart is rendered unto God and not unto your world, and this, even in a fairy tale, maddens you.

It maddens you so much that you deny Bess's greatest and fondest wish, the life of her beloved. For the sake of your Ethics, Jan must die, is that it? I believe this to be the case indeed. I do not know what sacrifice is more frightening, my dear Professor: the sacrifice that God demands of Bess for the sake of her love or the one that you demand for your Ethics. Let me think about this.

Bess's sacrifice is frightening indeed. As she went to the boat to meet her death, I cried. A friend of mine told me that at that moment he could not bear to be in the theater. Nevertheless, a few critics have dismissed the horror of this scene, claiming that the audience is in no doubt that divine Providence will set everything right. I can only wish that one day I can have such an easy faith as these critics and the alleged audience they write about. Yes, yes, I heard God tell Bess that He was with her, but I could only see her being butchered. And, yes, I cried because I could not bear the loss of such a trusting and loving human being. Yes, I admit it, I want her for my world just as much as you want her for yours. I could not help but think what I could do to keep her from the boat--I would have done anything--, but even if somehow I could have been put into this contrafactual, I would have been able to do nothing for Bess's faith is too great to subdue. She must go to the boat and be butchered. This sacrifice is frightening because it is inevitable.

"A ha!" I can hear you exclaim, "Despite all your vicious ad hominems at me, painting me as a blaspheming, self-deceiving Ethics Professor, you have all but conceded by your own emotions that this story is indeed a tragedy!" Yes, but my emotions are just human, Bess's smile is human and more so. Would a tragic figure smile so gently as she meets her doom? No, because tragedy belongs to the realm of the merely human. After the Incarnated Word, there is no tragedy because we humans can be more than human: Death has lost its sting. And, therefore, smiling faith is possible. I am not claiming that I know this. I can only repeat what I memorised of my catechism, but somehow I know that Bess knows this--somehow. Even though I may think her sacrifice a horrible tragedy (which I would not wish even on Ethics professors), I dare not think this too loudly lest I insult Bess's intelligence. And in insulting Bess's intelligence, I would be insulting Bess herself. I cannot bring myself to insult someone whom I admire and love. Therefore, as agonizing as her sacrifice is, I am nonetheless forced to take comfort, however thin and brittle this comfort may be, that Bess genuinely knows something that I can only parrot.

Now let's look at the sacrifice you demand. This sacrifice is necessary for this fairy tale to be the tragedy you claim it really is. As a tragedy the story would have no miracle, Jan would die, and, of course, no bells would ring. I must remark once again how odd and, if truth be told, perverse all this is: you want a story with a joyous ending to be instead a rather pointless tragedy. I say "pointless" because, to put it crudely, without the miracles there is no pay-off. We cannot but conclude that Bess's most cherished belief was simply wrong, that this woman threw herself to slaughter to no purpose other than to satisfy either the mad delusions of her mind or of her husband's evil fantasies or the whims of a cruel, sadistic God, none of which point to anything we should desire or hope for. Tragedy, of course, defies our fondest teleologies. I merely want to make clear the enormity of your sacrifice. By your insistence that Breaking the Waves is a tragedy at its authentic core, you are not only condemning Jan to death but Bess and all the charms and great power of her love to utter utter hopelessness. Whereas Bess sacrifices only her self and that is horrible enough, your sacrifice seems a thousand times more awful for you are sacrificing hope.

But now you are jumping up and down wildly, screaming at me, and your screams go something like this: "Oh, no, don't blame me for sacrificing hope. You make it sound like I want to do this, this monstrous sacrificing of hope, as if I were some metaphysical Robespierre. Bess herself says just before she dies that maybe, she was wrong. She herself has renounced hope and meets her demise in awareness of her failure. Hence, she herself realises that hers was a tragedy, which makes her--by all classical definitions of tragedy, I might add--a tragic hero. That's why I say that the authentic core of this film is a tragedy; I am merely understanding Bess as she ultimately comes to understand herself (and that is Straussian, Paul; how can you not see my argument now?). My objection to Jan's miracles and the bells is simply an observation of what even you cannot deny, Paul, namely that they just do not square with Bess's own last words, the last articulation of her 'authentic core'." Oh, now you got me! I won't even quibble that Bess's "maybe" allows us to believe that her renunciation of hope is not quite complete (a literature professor would, but I am merely a humble dabbler in philosophy). No, you really got me. How can I take comfort, even a little comfort in Bess's faith when even she renounces it? I can't unless Bess's faith is greater than Bess herself and as such does not go away even though she abandons it when she dies. But this is absurd, eh? Yes, you got me. This film, properly understood, is indeed a tragedy, and everything I have written in this letter has been like a clanging gong.

And, hence, you have been right all along. You can rest assured, my dear Professor, that Ethics is safe. Bess has met her tragedy because her wild love led her to hubris against Ethics for which she paid dearly. She may have condemned herself to pointless tragedy, but, it must be admitted, the tragedy for us is not pointless at all. It serves as a dire warning to any of us who would dare put our trust in our profoundest yearnings for a greater love and not in Ethics. I think we should call Von Trier's editor and tell him that he must needs re-edit the film.

One last question: I am sure you have seen Peter Pan at least once in your life. Did you clap to save Tinkerbell?

Love, Paul S. Rhodes

Questions regarding the Brave New Definition of "Marriage"

2010-09-09T01:23:00.001-05:00

Take the Halpern definition of marriage as a "union of two persons." Not only is this definition new, lacking any historical or legal pedigree, it is also vague to the point of being unsustainable in public policy. Certainly we must ask many questions of it that are difficult to answer. Exactly what sort of union does it have in view? Given that the union no longer answers to a procreative norm, what marks it out as something of particular value to society, worthy of public recognition and support? Is there even a standard against which it can be measured? If it is a union based on love, how shall we define love, and is the mere profession of love sufficient? Need the love, or at all events the commitment, be sexual? Sexual or otherwise, why should the union in question be a union of only two? And if a union of two, why should it continue to be exclusive? Why, for that matter, should it be for life? Such questions are not merely hypothetical. They are being put, and they will be put, not only in civil discourse but if necessary also in the courts.
--Douglas Farrow, Divorcing Marriage, "Facing Reality", pp. 155-6

What Theism does not require

2010-09-03T22:53:00.001-05:00

The purpose of this post is not to argue against the Atheist that God exists. The point of this post is simply to remind certain Theists in this country that belief in God does not imply other beliefs. For instance, belief in God does not imply belief that America is His special messenger or His special Angel of Vengeance. From this it follows that a Theist need not believe that it is America's divine mission to spread its version of democracy throughout the world or to kill millions of people to do so. Theism also does not require belief that the free market is God's way of rewarding the righteous on earth. In fact, nothing about Theism prevents the devout believer from thinking insanely successful Capitalists are not righteous at all but thieving bastards, whose outrageous larcenies and depredations cry out to God for sulfurous vengeance. It should also be noted that whereas it is possible to defend Theism with philosophical argument (e.g. the Five Ways of Aquinas), the beliefs in the divine mission of American Imperialism and the virtue of Capitalism can be held only by a willfully blind faith.

Other examples of beliefs commonly mistaken to be corollaries of Theism are: the notion that Israel has the absolute right to treat Palestinians like pieces of shit, the idea that Chastity Balls really prevent fornication and do not indulge the incestuous fantasies of really, really creepy dads, the belief that Glenn Beck is NOT a certifiable lunatic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Theism is merely the proposition that there is a personal, almighty being that created the universe and sustains it. Such a proposition has NOTHING to do with murderous American Imperialism, Capitalist Catastrophes, the fascist state of Israel, the sleaziness of Chastity Balls, or Glenn Beck's hyperventilating histrionics. And for this only one thing is appropriate to say: Thank God!

De gustibus vero disputandum est

2010-07-30T00:48:00.006-05:00

One night my dear mother (may God rest her eternal Soul!) and I were in the car, coming home from somewhere. Probably from the grocery store, but I really can't remember (because I am old and decrepit). We were listening to the radio. It was a classical musical station, most likely 99.1 FM (Now Joy FM--you happy-clappy evangelicals can go fuck yourselves because you are barbaric boobs who, if you ever attain the Beatific Vision, will be utterly unable to appreciate it because you have shown yourselves utterly impervious to the sublime, but I digress). I have no idea what was playing but shall never ever forget that it was a piece in which violins were quite prominent indeed. For I said to Mother that I thought violins sounded like cat screams. Mother got angry and proceeded to chide me for what by her lights was an obvious aesthetic stupidity on my part.

Right now I am listening to a recording of Bach's works for solo violin, and the violin is miked rather closely. In other words, the violin is rather loud. It does sound like a very raw, shrill scream even when it plays Bach's blissful fugues. But a cat scream is not at all an apt description, of course, and my Mother was right to dismiss it as an idle stupidity of a child who just wants to hear his own chatter. The scream of the violin does not express the ephemeral irritation of a savage id. It expresses the pain of human longing. And if one cannot see the beauty in that, then he might as well be a self-absorbed cat.

I shall be forever grateful that my Mother bullied me into liking the painful sound of the violin. Especially now that she is dead, and even after twenty-two years of her absence, I still long to see her, and the only thing I know that can articulate this enormous, enduring, and ineradicable ache is a persistently screaming violin.

Mutti, ich liebe Dich, and Du gehst mir schmerzlich ab.

Why I am not a Protestant

2010-06-04T23:36:00.004-05:00

[This is a scene from a play that I never wrote. Actually, I just wrote this scene, and it's not very good. I include it here because it does have the merit of explaining why I would never be a Protestant.

The play was supposed to about Marlene Nowotniak. She is a very bright 16 year old girl and a very beautiful one as well. She likes to frequent a used bookstore, owned by Friedrich Nietzsche (I just decided to put Nietzsche in for the hell of it), who has as his indentured servant a very bizarre but orthodox Catholic, Ken Silenus. Ken tries to convince Marlene of the need to believe in Catholicism to understand Shakespeare properly. Marlene will have none of it, though, saying that she likes Shakespeare just fine as an atheist.

Much to Ken's horror, the charming and elegant and witty Marlene falls head over heels for a quaterback from her High School. His name is Scott Coiler, and he is a grunt, the type that thinks poetry is for the limp-wrists. Ken, alarmed by Marlene's rather embarrassing public displays of affection with Scott, sternly warns Marlene of the dangers and sinfulness of pre-marital sex, but Marlene does not heed and does it, anyway. Then Scott goes off and gets saved at a Bible Youth Camp. Upon his return Scott promptly dumps Marlene because she is an imbiber of secular humanism. Other boys at the High School dump their girlfriends for the same reason. Marlene starts to
fight back. She starts the Dumped by Elmer Gantry Club, which proceeds to trumpet loudly the names of the boys who were players before they got saved--and after. This irks the Christian Youth Group, named Dudes for Christ. The Youth Minister, John Knox, has a sit down with Scott about this matter. Scott suggests that the kook at the used book store put Marlene up to this, whereupon John Knox and he go pay Ken Silenus a visit.]

(Mr. Knox and Scott enter. Ken is at the cash register, puffing away.)

Ken: Yeah, I am just about to close. What the fuck do you want?

John Knox: Hello, Mr. Silenus, my name is John Knox. This will just take a second, I promise. I think you know Scotty here.

Ken: (exhaling a great big wad of smoke) Yeah, I've seen him around.

JK: Well, I am with the Dudes for Christ, and Scott here is my main dude in Christ. Aren't you, Scotty?

Scott: Amen, Dude. (High fives Mr. Knox)

Ken: (muttering under his breath) Ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me.

JK: And we're here to... (finally notices Ken's T-Shirt, which reads: "I'd rather be a gay porn fluffer than a Protestant.") Mr. Silenus, I realize, we live in a free country and you have the God-given right to express whatever you want...

Ken: (exhales yet another great big wad of smoke, this time in the direction of John Knox)

JK: ...but I must tell you that your T-Shirt does not send off good Christian vibes. Scotty here told me you're Catholic, and that's cool. We respect that.

Scott: Did your priest tell ya to be his fluffer in confession?

JK: Now, now, Scotty, that doesn't send off good Christian vibes, either.

Ken: (throws his cigarette down on the floor, stamps it out, and fishes in his front pants pocket for another)

Scott: Well, did he?

Ken: No, I was too busy sacrificing Protestant babies in the crypt. (lights the next one in the chain)

JK: Our Lord told us not to dis our enemies, remember? Scotty? Not that we think Catholics are our enemies, of course. No, Mr. Silenus, we are, as Vatican II, your most recent council, decreed, Brethren in Christ. That t-shirt of yours really does not jibe with the Spirit of your own denomination, does it now, Mr. Silenus. As one Christian to another, as one brother in Christ to another brother, I would tell you to take it off.

Ken: Nah, it's cold.

JK: I got some extra Dude for Christ t-shirts in my duffel bag. You want one of those?

Ken: No, I do not. See, I really would prefer to be a cocksucker than a Protestant, especially one in his late fifties who goes around carrying Dude for Christ t-shirts.

JK: Now, look here... I'm 49, and...

Ken: Just, please, state your business here. I am about to close.

Scott: Stop feeding Marlene all your bullshit!

Ken: And what bullshit would that be, Scott? Praytell, like telling her any guy who would fuck her and leave her is a paradigmatic asshole? Bullshit like that, Scott?

Scott: Whatever

Ken: You are a textbook example of a grunt.

JK: Yes, Scott sinned, Mr. Silenus. "There is no one who does good, not
even one." Romans 3:12. We're all sinners, Mr. Silenus, but we've all been
washed clean and pure of our iniquities in the blood of the lamb, Jesus
Christ...

Ken: That one righteous dude!

JK: (JK is ready to high five Ken, and Ken in a moment of reluctant charity
lets him) Yes, isn't God awesome?

Ken: Now, let's do the wave.

JK: Mr. Silenus, this is an awesome message of mercy and love that we are trying to spread in an area where the kids desperately need it. Their parents make them feel worthless if they get anything less than a five on their AP exam or they don't make the first string of the football team.

Ken: Of if they throw six interceptions for three consecutive games.

Scott: Hey!!

JK: Now, Scotty, he has a point.

Scott: Whatever.

JK: The kids have no hope unless they can prove themselves to be successful candidates for the upper-middle-class. And we want to tell them that hope does not depend on that kind of social status. No, it is light years more permanent than that for it rests in the permanent and final sacrifice of that one righteous dude, Jesus Christ. He'll love you no matter what, even if you do get a four on the AP or make it only to second string.

Ken: Your point:

JK: This is a message that is really saving kids' lives and is giving them hope, and now it is being undermined by Marlene Nowotniak's club. She is making us look bad.

Ken: Yes, and?

JK: Could you just talk to Marlene for us? Could you tell her that she is doing much more harm than good?

Ken: No, and I got to close. Bye.

JK: I know you think we are spreading anti-romanist heresy. Yes, I know you are a very, er, gung-ho Catholic. But we are bringing people to Christ. We are snatching kids away from their despair...

Ken: ...and their responsibility.

Scott: Look, I sinned, okay? The whole state knows I boinked Marlene. But
you sin, right?

JK: The Lord knows I do, my man!

Ken: Please, no high five this time.

Scott: And you sin. You're sinning right now by filling your body with
that shit.   And you're body s supposed to be a temple for God.

Ken: (blowing smoke in Scott's face) So, sin is sin, eh?

JK: Exactly. We are sinful by nature, and it is by Christ's mercy alone
that we are covered with that awesome grace that makes us acceptable to Him.

Ken: So, smoking a fag is as depraved and rancid as deflowering a sixteen
year old.

Scott: I would never blow a fag. I don't do that shit. I ain't no homo.

JK: Scott, "fag" is British for cigarette. Calm down.

Scott: Well, I don't smoke neither.

JK: In God's eyes, yes. It's all equally evil.

Ken: Mr. Knox, I will not dissuade Marlene from her campaign. I will only encourage her. Now, if you will be so kind as to remove your heretical asses from my establishment.

Scott: But she don't even believe in God. She believes in Darwin and that crap.

JK: Scotty here has a point. Do you really want the secularist poison to
prevail over the Gospel?

Ken: Yup. I really do. Because I vomit at the notion that the theft of a paper clip is as evil as, say, the systematic gassing of millions of innocent men, women, and children.

JK: Not one of us is innocent.

Ken: Oh, yes, we are all totally, comprehensively, fucking depraved. So depraved that God has to mask us with a bodycast of grace just to look at us. I want to be loved for who I am, not for some mask I wear. And if God can love us only with a mask, then fuck God.

JK: "The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body."

Ken: Oh, shove James up your ass. You people love James 3, but you're not so hot on James 2. Or James 5, where he mentions sins that cry out to the heavens for vengeance. Well, what your main dude Scotty did is just such a sin.

Scott: Show me that in the Bible, asshole.

JK: Now, Scotty.

Ken: Fuck the Bible. I am talking about what was in front of your very eyes, what you touched, whose sweet voice whispered "I love you" in your ear. A beautiful woman who loved you so much she gave you her everthing, her body, her soul. She put her very temple at your disposal. Even though you are the Protestant paragon of the totally depraved Adam, whose good deeds, if thereare any, are nothing but filthy rags. But she loved you all the same, and if that's not the incarnation of gratuitous grace, of amazing grace, of the free, unmerited gift that you Prots always yap about, then fuck Luther's God. And to reject such amazing grace is nothing less than the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. A cocksucker, as perverse and vile as he is, shows more gratitude towards God's creation than do you, and that's why I wear this t-shirt with pride.

JK: It sounds like you worship earthly creatures. It is my duty as a Christian to warn you against idolatry.

Ken: It is my duty as a very tired shopkeeper to tell you to leave, please.

JK: I'll be praying for you.

Ken: Sure. Now go, please.

Scott: (on his way out) Marlene is not God, and Mary isn't God, either.

Ken: Whatever.

Targeted facebook ads

2010-06-04T02:43:00.005-05:00

Well, there's been a lot of concern and consternation about privacy on the social networking site facebook. The Powers that Be at facebook want information from you, so that they can tailor ads just for your specific needs and wants. This is creepy, I must admit, but after seeing the latest ad targeted at me, I must say that the Huckstering Big Brother at facebook is not prying all that much into my facebook page. In the last two days I have been writing quite a bit about Israel. And, what do you know, I get this ad:

Tell Congress you support Israel and we'll send you a free book. Join Christians United for Israel and sign the Israel pledge today!

Facebook Huckstering Big Brother is obviously a dumbfuck that needs to take a remedial reading course for everything I've written about Israel has been denunciatory such as, say, "Israel can go fuck herself." Or facebook Big Brother's data-collecting program just saw that I am a Christian who mentions Israel repeatedly, sufficient criteria to trigger the program's algorithm to send that ad to me. In other words, facebook Big Brother has even less understanding than Searle's Chinese Box, and this is supposed to worry me?

Yeah, I am a Christian, but hardly one who has a hard-on for Israel. I'm Catholic. The New Israel for me is the Catholic Church. The Modern State of Israel has no religious significance for me at all. I don't believe that slitting the throat of a Perfectly Red Heifer will hasten the Rapture. I don't believe that a rebuilt Temple is God's will; it is nothing but an insane fantasy that, if actually realized, would make the whackoes in the Middle East even more apeshit than they already are.

No, I don't stand with Israel. I think the world would be a better place if the United States stopped sending Israel billions of dollars in aid every year and gave that money to a worthier cause like, say, CitiBank. And it could give the weapons to a worthier clientele, too, like, say, English Soccer Fans.

I must note that the Israeli Propaganda Machine is getting very desperate indeed if it is now asking Christians to sign an "Israel Pledge". If it's as successful as all those Virginity Pledges have been, AIPAC will soon see 50% of its base bearing bastards by Palestinians and Chomskyite self-hating Jews.

Of course, I could be all wrong about the fuck-up that sent this ad to me. Perhaps, it isn't a fuck-up at all, but a Mossad marker. They're on to me. Targeted ad leads to targeted assassination. Makes sense after all. I am critical of Israel. I have knives in the kitchen. I have chairs. And while I don't have any pipe handy or crowbars, I do have real scary yard tools. I must be a terrorist.

Yesterday's Thunderstorms

2010-05-27T21:54:00.002-05:00

Apparently the St. Louis Area was afflicted with tremendous thunderstorms yesterday. There were ferocious and frequent cracks of lightning. Downpours. Motorists had to pull off to the sides of highways. Bows broke. Down came baby, cradle and all. It was, from what I heard, all quite Wagnerian and Apocalyptic. So, my question is: what St. Louisan in the Eighteenth Century made a pact with Satan? Someone must have. How else can one explain such Götterdämmerung-like weather? The question is who. Inquiring minds want to know, Mr. Robertson.

Happy Anniversary!

2010-03-20T00:19:00.001-05:00

Seven years ago yesterday the United States of America committed an international crime. It invaded a country that had not attacked it. This country did not even pose a credible threat to the U.S., imminent or otherwise. It was a war of aggression, pure and simple. This is not just any international crime. It is what Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, called "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Mr. Jackson was, of course, referring to the Wars of Aggression waged by Nazi Germany, and some will say, of course, that Jackson would never ever say this of us because the U.S.A. always goes to war with the noblest of intentions. This is supposed to mean that it is fine and dandy when we kill people because we are, unlike the Nazis, noble. Yeah, I'll remember that when I hold up a convenience store. Hey, officer, I robbed and killed the clerk because I am noble. I was fighting for freedom. So, how dare you treat me like a criminal.

Every official reason for the Iraq War has turned out to be a lie and a sick, ugly joke. Iraq was a big, bad, ominous threat even though it could not knock out one plane enforcing the two no-fly zones over its territory despite twelve years of repeated attempts. Well, Iraq was stockpiling WMD even though its defense budget could barely afford spitballs. These WMD stockpiles were never ever found because they did not exist.

We said we went to war to make Iraq a better place. If that's true, then why does Iraq have the biggest refugee problem of any country on the planet? If Iraq is truly better for our having invaded it, bombed the shit out of it, and saturated its soil and air with depleted uranium, then why do the Iraqis want to flee?

We said we went to Iraq to bring freedom. Tell that to thousands of women who have become sex slaves just so they can feed themselves. Tell that to the millions more who have lost the rights that they had under the Baathist Regime and are now subject to the cruel whimsies of Sharia Law.

I repeat, Iraq did not attack us. Iraq did not threaten us. Iraq could not threaten us. We did not make that country better. He have made it worse. We have fucked it over. More children are starving and dying of preventable diseases than under Saddam's Tyranny. We did not fight the war to bring freedom but to bring profits to Haliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, etc. We invaded Iraq to feed our gluttony and because we just like to kill and kill and rape and kill.

All this is obvious, but there are incredibly still people who support the Iraq War, and among these psychopaths are people who have the temerity to call themselves "pro-life". They claim to stand up for the weak and defenseless, and yet they cheered Bush on when he bombed and bombed and bombed a very weak country. They cheered him on while he committed the "supreme international crime", the crime that made Nazi Germany infamous. And yet these neo-Nazis have the gall to call themselves pro-life.

I want them to stop. I have stated this many times before and I shall state it until the message gets though every thick skull of every loathsome, bloodthirsty bastard that sullies the pro-life name. You people who support American Foreign Policy have forfeited your right to call yourselves pro-life. American Foreign Policy is pro-torture, pro-murder, pro-death, the very opposite of pro-life. Do you understand that you are making a mockery of the pro-life cause? Do you realize that you are doing damage to the pro-life cause? Do you understand that when you call yourselves pro-life and yet rally behind a patently unjust war the way the Germans did at the Sportpalast, "pro-life" becomes for any sane person an object of scorn and disgust? Do you realize this? If you don't, then you can go fuck yourselves and go to hell.

We're next!

2010-03-04T02:02:00.000-06:00

So, all the plates around us have moved. God's Wrath has been working overtime. Haiti got hit because a few uppity slaves made a pact with Satan two centuries ago. Chile elected as president an agnostic woman who wears pants. It was obviously a matter of time before God would unload his can of whoopass on them. The Japanese worshiped Hirohito, exported defective cars, and eat really ugly, slimy bottomfeeders that squirt out black ooze. But the Japanese know they are evil, hellbound heathens and have made all their buildings earthquake proof in anticipation of God's ire.

Now, we haven't had a major earthquake in the States for decades. Even though we elected George Bush der Zweite, made Brittany Spears a star, and forced everyone to listen to Madonna. We've just been begging God to pulverize us, and I'd expect the New Madrid Fault will soon split wide open in the middle of this blaspheming and oh so tacky nation, and every single American will fall into the pit of hell. If Haiti, Chile, and Japan have to pay for their many sins, we do as well. We're next.

Ash Wednesday

2010-02-17T00:59:00.001-06:00

Today is Ash Wednesday. All Catholics are obligated under pain of perpetual perdition not merely to abstain from the consumption of meat but to fast as well. Now, fasting does not mean not eating. It has a very specific meaning, having been defined with the greatest of rigorist care by expert and holy Canon Lawyers.

On Ash Wednesday, Catholics between the ages of fourteen and fifty-nine are allowed only one full meal, and the other two meals must each be half the size of the single permitted full one. If either is more than half, then get used to an eternity of searing, screaming AGONY IN HELL! And, remember, you may not have any meat (fish and crustaceans excepted), either.

So, today I plan to have lobster for breakfast, lobster for lunch, and, because I am an obedient son of the Church, two lobsters for dinner. God, how I love my Jesuit Education!

A good line

2010-02-14T01:35:00.002-06:00

One of the more worrisome aspects of being a lonely middle-aged guy is the bad habit of laughing at one's own jokes and quips. But I think I had a fairly good line today. Of course, being a lonely middle-aged guy, I would think this. Self-flattery is rather icky, true, but it does stave off desperation.

Anyway, I was at one of my favorite haunts where I learned that one of the prettier barmaids (I use the term loosely, mind) is slated to be married this coming October. Her wedding will be in Las Vegas even though she and her fiancé both live in St. Louis. Upon receipt of this information, I quipped, "Yes, nothing says undying love and devotion like a wedding in Vegas.

Her fellow barmaids (remember that this term is quite loose) burst out laughing. The soon-to-be bride did not. Oh, well. A majority thought it was funny, and who am I to contradict democracy?

Why is Pat Robertson so stupid?

2010-02-12T14:23:00.001-06:00

Well, I am glad you asked that, my token black sub-host, because I can give you the answer since I am the host of an international television show watched by millions of people who have read only one book--if any, that is--and have mercilessly been spared the burden of critical thinking. So, it doesn't matter whether I am a historical authority or no; my viewers think I am, and, God bless 'em, who am I, a lowly servant in God's vineyard, to say that they are wrong?

Anyway, a long time ago back in 18th Century England, when Lord Cromwell was king--or was it Otto von Bismark, it doesn't matter--Pat Robertson's great-great-great-great-great granddady, the Earl of Robertshire, wanted to spend a little extra time reading Holy Scripture with his young maid. But he did not want his wife finding out. So, the Earl made a pact with Satan. He would give his soul to Satan if Satan distracted his wife while he shared some Biblical knowledge with the maid. Now, the Earl of Robertshire knew that once saved, he would always be saved, and he had definitely been saved once. So, he knew that Satan would have no power over him, regardless of the terms of the pact.

Unfortunately, it was the Earl who was duped because it was not Satan with whom he made the deal, but Satan's stupid twin brother, Virgil, who did not understand the Baptist Doctrine of Eternal Security. And so, when the Earl of Robertshire finally died of what was then known as the French Disease, Virgil, utterly ignorant of Baptist Theology, took the Earl's soul down to hell, and everyone in the Earl's family has been stupid ever since down to this very day.

I have to add

2010-01-15T19:12:00.000-06:00

Pat Robertson claimed that the Haitians sold their soul to the Devil in exchange for freedom from the French. I did some checking on this. Haiti was a French Slave Colony in the Eighteenth Century. And then the French Revolution happened, and news of this momentous event reached the Haitian Slaves. Well, those slaves weren't stupid. They thought that if the French People could throw off their shackles, the inhabitants of Haiti could do so as well and, therefore, started a rebellion. This rebellion was long and very bloody. The French demonstrated therein their conviction that the Universal Rights of Man did not extend to poor black slaves. Nevertheless, the Slaves fought on and eventually defeated the French racists. This was the only successful slave rebellion in history, and that's what irks Pat Robertson. The nigger can't be superior to his White Betters, and if the former defeats the latter, well, that is contrary to Divinely Ordained Nature of Things and, hence, can be explained only as a Satanic Perversion.

Pat Robertson, you are a vile racist, and racism is a Satanic Perversion. For all I know, you may be the incarnation of Satan. That would not surprise me in the least.

Pact with Satan

2010-01-14T22:37:00.002-06:00

Someone observed today on Mark Shea's weblog that had Haiti really made a pact with the devil, as Pat Robertson has claimed, the country would now be rich instead of the pathetic basket case of a mudball that it now is. It would be a country like, say, Great Britain or The United States of America. I wholeheartedly agree.

Think about it. Satan is in the damnation business. No one really likes damnation. And so if Satan is ever gonna get people to accept eternal perdition, he must advertise. And the history of Haiti is just a lousy commercial for the sale of one's soul. Hey, everyone, sell your soul, and end up like Haiti, a poor country that the United States likes to fuck with just for fun. Doesn't work, does it?

This pitch works a lot better: Sell your soul and become the most powerful nation on earth, be able to fuck over poor countries like Haiti, and have self-righteous pricks tell you that the Haitians deserve to be the fucked-over poor because they are Satan's Spawn. Now that sounds like fun. That would get me to sell my soul.

But, alas, I am a citizen of the U.S.A. I already have.

Re-Post

2009-10-08T23:50:00.001-05:00

[I wrote this on September 13, 2006--PSR]

I watched NBC's latest episode of "To Catch a Predator" this evening. For those of you who may not be familiar with this recurring Dateline series, it is the televising of a sting operation, in which perverts are lured on the internet to drive to some house in the middle of nowhere to have sex, or so they are led to believe, with an underage teen. Once these perverts arrive at the house, expecting to have a night of decadent bliss with a fresh ingenue, Chris Hansen pops out and confronts them with the logs of their truly scuzzy chats and thereby makes them feel really, really ashamed and scared shitless about being exposed on national television (and their impending arrest). After they have confessed and expressed a minimum amount of remorse for their total depravity, Hansen tells them they are free to go. Well, no. They are free to leave the house, but once outside, they are tackled by a squad of badged thugs who always seem to be especially brutal for television cameras.

Now, Dateline advertises this series as a public service. After all, they are helping to lock up these monsters so they can't prey on the innocent young, and by televising the stings, Dateline is deterring perverts from shopping the internet for their victims. Well, not exactly. A good many of the scuzzballs caught in tonight's installment actually had seen past episodes of "To Catch a Predator" and trolled for teenage twat anyway. One must be capable of some reason to be deterred, but the total depravity of original sin kills our reason. We live in a Calvinist country after all, and Calvinism says we will sin no matter what. We're told all the time that abortion is legal because there is no way to deter abortion. Fine. Dateline has shown that pedophilia can't be deterred either. Let's legalize it then. Either that or we kill anyone who demonstrates pedophiliac tendencies.

Dateline is televising the stings of these twisted individuals simply because totally depraved sex sells. "To Catch a Predator" is in the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille's religious epics, which got away with going to town with all sorts of lurid depravity just as long as there were a few scenes of Charlton Heston's righteous indignation. So, we can have our perverse thrills at the thought of doing it doggiestyle with a curious, rebellious teen free of parental supervision as long as we agree with Chris Hansen that such thoughts are too disgusting even to be typed out on a keyboard (much less aired on National Television!).

Most of the men caught in these stings are pathetic losers who desperately want feelings of power. If they just wanted sex with young bodies, they would go after eighteen year olds (or sixteen year olds if they live in, say, Iowa; current age of consent laws are just stupid). But they go after underage teens because underage teens finally provide these powerless schmucks with a comfortable power differential. It's precisely why I like to play chess with people who call the knight "a horsey". These guys suck at fishing, and so they want to shoot fish in a barrel and steal candy from babies.

Part of the problem must be that capitalistic society has made everything into a competition, even affection. To be happily married with a loving family, one must make at least $50,000 a year, if not more, and one has to have power to reach that level. In other words, only the powerful deserve affection. And so the poor schmucks try to find affection from people who aren't yet cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and those people are the callow and exploitable underaged. But the powerful, too, become pedophiles because somewhere in the back of their minds they know that their wives just married them for the money and are, thus, simply respectable whores, and, so, the American Dream becomes just as morally repulsive as, say, doing it doggystyle with a thirteen-year-old, but with this difference: the thirteen-year-old won't nag.

No, I am not defending these perverts. I am saying that in this country we worship power just as much as the neo-cons and the Huntingtonites say the Muslim fascists do. They worship the power of the sword, and we worship the power of the Almighty Dollar, and our beatific visions are measured in profitable exploitations. Exploiting nature so that it will be more profitably efficient, perpetual wars to enrich the military industrial complex, the pornography industry because sterile sex must bear its fruit in lots and lots of cash, and killing human life at its very beginnings for spare parts. Is it any wonder, then, that some men in this already sick society would apply its depraved logic to the innocence of the young? The powerful exploit the less powerful for gain, and that's all what these perverts do.

To Be or Not To Be

2009-10-04T16:24:00.000-05:00

DocManJay

2009-10-02T23:24:00.000-05:00

DocManJay is the screen name of one of the most popular bloggers on MySpace. That he is shows that the intellectual level of the surreal world that is MySpace is very low. My intelligent quotient excreted point after point as I read just one of his incoherent rants. My mind suffered diarrhea.

Even though I am thoroughly ashamed that I have exposed myself to such dreck, I cannot resist pointing out just one of this man's idiocies, even though doing so is as challenging as, say, beating Sarah Palin at Scrabble or, well, tic tac toe. DocManJay in the aforementioned entry on his weblog kvetches about us Bush Bashers undermining everything Bush did. Yeah, that's right. He says that our Bush Bashing undermined everything Bush did. Well, we are powerful motherfuckers, aren't we, then? We managed to stop Bush from waging illegal and unjust wars. We stopped him from torturing people and wiretapping this entire country. We stopped Bush from giving all our money to Haliburton, Bechtel, and the Banks. We stopped him from burying this country in mountains of debt.

We did all these things according to DocManJay, and he is demonizing us for having done so? He should be thanking us--if we really did undermine everything that Bush did. But we can only wish we had, and then only in our wildest wet dreams. If there was any administration that showed that Freedom of Speech and Participatory Democracy do not mean diddleysquat, it was the Bush Administration. All our protests, reasoned arguments, and moral outrage really had no effect. Iraq was transformed into a bloody wasteland, Afghanistan was given over to the murderous, pederast Warlords, torture thrived, the U.S. became East Germany, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer. We undermined nothing, and DocManJay is an idiot.

My First Video Blog

2009-09-29T01:25:00.000-05:00

Irving Kristol, 1920-2009

2009-09-21T12:50:00.001-05:00

The only good neo-con is a...

When I'm 64

2009-08-06T14:02:00.001-05:00

The Atomic Age started 64 years ago today when we dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima--without any justification whatsoever. Well, we said that this deadly nuclear Holocaust was justified. But this was a lie we told ourselves so that we still could be naïve and innocent and believe that we are indeed The Shining City on a Hill, even if that Hill is one fucking putrid bloody landfill. I think it is needless to say that a lie, however pleasant and comforting, cannot justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. I hope, at least, that my fellow Catholics who are unfortunately proud of their American Patriotism (for example, Phyllis Schlafley) are nevertheless still sufficiently Catholic to know that a lie is evil, even when the supposedly greatest country in the fucking history of the fucking world tells one. I really hope so.

Anyway, the lie is this: Japan just would not surrender, and so we had only two choices: 1) invade Japan or 2) nuke a city or two. Since an invasion of an entire country would have been really, really savage, bloody, and far deadlier than the destruction of just one or two cities, dropping the bomb was indeed the comparatively humane thing to do, and we Americans always want to do the humane thing. Just ask the Cherokee or the Seminole or the Phillipine Muslims or, well, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Right. Well, this is a lie because...oh, where do I start? We did not have only those two choices because Japan was trying to surrender all during the summer of 1945. True, they did not want to submit to an "unconditional surrender", whatever the fuck that meant. No surrender can be "unconditional" unless the vanguished agree to fulfill every single whim of the victors. What? We wanted the Japanese to lick our feet and suck our cocks or, if it struck our fancy, to be handcuffed and penetrated in every orifice? Did the Land of Wholesome Godliness, Motherhood, and Apple Pie nuke those two Japanese cities for the sake of BDSM? I hope my fellow Catholics who are too eager to salute the American Flag are, if not really Catholic, still sufficiently human to realize that unleashing the Atomic Scourge for the sake of a rapist's domination is so empty of any good or reason as to escape the bounds of language altogether.

Yes, it is true that even though the Japanese were suing for peace, they still insisted upon one very specific, definite condition. They wanted to be allowed to keep their Emperor. And we would not let them. Surely, that's because if they were allowed to keep their Emperor, the Japanese would be emboldened to start up another Empire, and then, before you knew it, they would be wanting to rape another Nanking, re-conquer Korea and the Phillippines, and plan another suicide surprise attack against us. After all, we Americans are such a nice, wholesome, kindly people, that we would not kill a quarter of a million people in one day unless there was a damn good reason to do so, eh? So, that must mean we sincerely believed that Hirohito was pure evil, and a Nuclear Holocaust, as heartwrenchingly tragic as it was, nevertheless was the necessary price to pay for finally ridding the world of that evil bloodthirsty, terrorist-inspiring, imperialist monster! After Japan's "unconditional surrender", General MacArthur allowed that incarnation of pure, unalloyed, unadulturated evil to keep his throne, and Japan has been our peaceful, acquiescent ally ever since. Oops!

The real story is that the Soviet Union was about to enter the War against Japan on August 9th, and if Japan did not surrender before the Soviets started fighting, the U.S. was facing the prospect of having to share Japan with the Reds. The U.S. did not want its Empire trammeled on in the Pacific as it had been in Europe. Also, the U.S., of course, had the Atom Bomb and wanted to show off its new toy to the Soviets and thereby notify them who now was in charge of the sandbox. If getting Japan to surrender was the reason why we nuked Hiroshima, then we would not have bombed Nagasaki as well. The Japanese were more than willing to suck our cocks after only one demonstration of our willingness to commit instant genocide. We simply wanted to show our new enemies that we now had the power of the gods and that just like the pagan gods of yore, we would use that power simply for our own fucking amusement, human misery be damned!

We nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply because we could, and if my fellow Catholics who are American Patriots still claim to be proud of America's past, then I don't want them to be my fellow Catholics.

Sarah Palin's Valedictory

2009-07-27T18:12:00.002-05:00

In her farewell to the Alaskan Statehouse yesterday, Mrs. Palin said that she would like to remind all those in the media that it is for their freedoms United States soldiers are overseas fighting and dying and that, therefore, the media should honor their freedoms' protectors and stop "making things up!"

Four points need to be made:

1) The soldiers who are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly doing so for the freedom of the press as Mrs. Palin would have us believe. We have no freedom of the press to fight and die for. If we had real freedom of the press, then the American People would be allowed to see the real horrors of war every night on their televisions, reported by journalists not embedded with and, therefore, not beholden to the military. But that kind of reporting happened in Vietnam, and it turned people against the war, and so our government had to put an end to such "freedoms". That's why now all our war journalists might as well be marionettes.

2) If the media had stopped making things up like, say, the story that Saddam Hussein would soon be able to shoot all kinds of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons at us, our soldiers would not be fighting and dying in that "war for freedom" that Mrs. Palin so jingoistically adores. Moreover, if the media had not been so busy making things up about the Big Bad Baghdad Bogeyman and reported true things such as, say, that the Taliban were ready to hand us Osama bin Laden if we only gave them hard proof that he was indeed behind the 9/11 Attacks, then our soldiers might not now be fighting and dying for "freedom" in Afghanistan, either.

3) Our soldiers are not the ones paying the heaviest price for our "freedoms". The poor people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan are. Our "free" media should honor them by at least reporting truthfully and comprehensively about how many of them our "freedom fighters" are wounding, torturing, and murdering.

4) Even without Tina Fey Sarah Palin remains a stupid, clueless, fascist bitch.

Hey, what about the Bisexuals?

2009-07-18T00:24:00.000-05:00

If current marriage laws in all but five states (I think it is five, anyway) deny an entire class of people the "fundamental" right to marry whomever they wish, don't these laws in their most unenlightened insistence that marriage is between just two people shamelessly violate the basic human rights of the bisexual? I mean, how the hell is a bisexual supposed to actualize fully his or her (or both) sexual identity with just one spouse?

A reminder to certain readers of mine

2009-07-12T17:00:00.002-05:00

One simply cannot be pro-life, declare that all human life is sacred and, therefore, should be respected, honored, and, above all, protected and at the same time support the murderous foreign policy of the United States Government, the premise of which is that it is noble and sweet to kill lots and lots of people for the sake of natural resources to fuel our gluttony.

Therefore, if you still support, say, the Iraqi War or the Afghan War but insist that you are pro-life, please, stop. You are doing the pro-life cause a disservice by robbing it of its original meaning and replacing it with something that cries out to God for vengeance.

Just Curious: Is this offensive?

2009-07-09T12:22:00.002-05:00

"Agriculture is now motorized food industry--in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."

Historians of Philosophy will recognize the above quote as one of the Nazi Martin Heidegger's more infamous dicta, and yet it seems to me that what he says here is the point of departure for the current critique of the Food Industry. After all, the predicate of this critique is that the Food Industry treats nature like a whore to be raped, and how is that different in kind from treating human beings as material for lamp shades?

So, if the critique against the Food Industry has a point, does this mean a progression in Heidegger's rehabilitation, or do we want to say that people like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and all advocates of a return to traditional (what is now called "organic") farming are really closet National Socialists?

The Parmenidian Prayer by Friedrich Nietzsche

2009-07-07T10:03:00.007-05:00

Below is my very, very favorite Nietzsche Quote. I know, I know. I am supposed to be a very devout Catholic and, therefore, I am not supposed to like Nietzsche. I also am supposed to practice custodia oculorum each and every time a lithe, luscious, and therefore tempting young woman crosses my path, but I do not. Philosophy starts in wonder and unfortunately I am too much of a philosopher to resist the wide-eyed wonder for which a beautiful young woman is the efficient, material, formal, and final cause. Yeah, I am a hypocrite. Perhaps. I am also Jesuit-educated and, therefore, can come up for an excuse for any sin just like an American Christian Republican but with this difference, my rationalizations are wittier and more elegant. I can always claim allegiance to the vigorous philosophical tradition that has always existed within Catholicism to justify my roving eye.

Yeah, but back to the Nietzsche Quote. It is a slap at Parmenides, the first systematic philosopher of Being, who was so obsessed with the eternity thereof that he philosophized Being out of our lives. Because he reasoned that Being must be eternal and unchanging, he thought he was forced to conclude that nothing transitory had Being and, thus, that everything around us was not a thing at all but simply an illusion, a lie. Parmenides was the first Protestant. The Protestants say nature is totally depraved and, thus, cannot be Godly in any way, and thus we must rely on faith alone in a God that can only be hidden, and Paramenides says that nature is too changeable to exist, and, therefore, we must conclude that we can never ever experience true Being. The former expresses philosophically what the latter says theologically, and so even though Nietzsche is that "God is Dead" Guy, and I as a Catholic am supposed to revile him as the Great Evil Atheist Bogeyman, I can still appreciate this zinger against Parmenides as a really great philosophical zinger against Protestantism and still remain an Orthodox Catholic:

"Merely a Certainty grant me, ye Gods, is the Prayer of Parmenides, and let there be over the sea of ignorance one small plank, just wide enough to lie on! Everything that becomes, that is voluptuous, damask, blossoming, deceiving, alluring and seductive, all that is full of life, all this you can have; only give me just one single, poor, empty certainty!"

--Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, §11

Questions to Ponder on this Fourth of July

2009-07-04T11:30:00.001-05:00

How can freedom differ from license? And is the freedom to bomb innocent civilians at will, as the Messiah is continuing to do in Pakistan, cause for celebration? And is the very attempt to define freedom a hopelessly performative contradiction because freedom, if it is true freedom, has no limits? And if freedom has no limits, does that mean that wars fought on behalf of freedom must be perpetual and, thus, can have no "exit strategy"? So, if true freedom can be sustained only by perpetual war which means, of course, perpetual bloodshed, why is freedom worth celebrating? Should the Fourth of July, the Feast Day of Freedom, be instead The Day That Will Live On In Infamy?

The Third Way of St. Thomas Aquinas

2009-06-09T19:39:00.000-05:00

Suppose that the universe is not the result of a Supreme Intellect. This means that the universe is eternal and is all there is, and since it was not the result of a plan, nothing rules it, which is just another way of saying the "principle" of everything is blind chance. So, since blind chance prevails, anything is possible, including the absolute cessation of life, the universe, and everything. A possibility could not be such if it could not happen, and given the eternity of the universe, there are an eternity of chances for every single possibility to become an actuality, including the total disappearance of the universe into utter nothingness. And yet the universe is still here despite the eternity of chances. Therefore, the universe is not governed by blind chance but must be governed by a mind.

One obvious objection to this argument leaps to mind: if the universe can chance to vanish, it can also chance to pop into existence. Fine, but if this, too, is possible, then something can come from nothing, and to hold this is to vitiate any principle of objective science. If things can just pop in and out of existence without any rhyme or reason, then it is clear that knowledge is impossible and reason is a laughingstock. In other words, if there is no ultimate mind behind the universe, then it is ultimately pointless to be as smart and intelligent as, say, Richard Dawkins thinks he is.

(Nota bene: The above is not intended as a proof for the existence of the personal Christian God. Philosophy cannot reach the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.)

Murder of an abortionist

2009-06-01T19:22:00.001-05:00

Blood will have blood, especially when helpless innocents are involved.

Why Ayn Rand fans are pathetic

2009-05-26T09:37:00.001-05:00

If one wants to be selfish, one should not have to have another
telling him how.

Et tu, Iowa?

2009-04-05T23:45:00.003-05:00

So, Iowa now has gay "marriage", eh? If such a wholesome piece of the nation's heartland has gay "marriage", the other states will fall like dominoes, and soon this will be the United States of San Francisco. That's the conventional wisdom, at least. Actually, this country was doomed to have gay "marriage" ever since the fateful Supreme Court Decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, nearly forty-five years ago. If it is perfectly legal to have deliberately sterile sexual intercourse, then one can have no legal objection to gay "marriage. It is that simple. The legalization of the condom and The Pill leads ineluctably to the acceptance of barren homosexual acts.

Now, what I want to know is this: With the legalization of gay "marriage", what will now be the legal definition of consummation? If Lesbian Couples do not use a strap-on at least once, will their "marriages" be considered null and void? Or will heterosexual couples now be able to consummate their marriages with buggery? Or simply with strategic licking? Or by holding hands at a production of My Fair Lady?

One could say, I guess, that consummation will be defined according to the nature of the couple's "love". Vaginal intercourse for heterosexuals, anal intercourse for gay men, and cunnilingus or, perhaps, fisting for Lesbians. But if that's the case, wouldn't that undermine the chief argument for gay "marriage", namely that the government has no business whatsoever defining something as intimate and private as Romantic Love?

It's really quite simple. If "love" can't be defined, then the consummation of "love" cannot be as well. It all depends upon the perspective of the lover and the beloved. For some phone sex is enough to consummate "love". For others cybersex. An erstwhile illegal immigrant* can say he really knew that his marriage was genuine the moment he got his Green Card, and who will be so arrogantly dogmatic as to say that the receipt of a Green Card cannot be a truly romantic experience? Yeah, for some that is simply gaming the system, but for others it is "love". No one has the right to tell others what "love" is between consenting adults. That's the law. Well, in Iowa, Connecticut, and that state I can't spell right now, at least.

*Yes, I know that some frown on the term "illegal immigrant", arguing that no human being is illegal. But the premise of this argument is false. "Immigrant" does not refer to the human being as such. It merely refers to the doer of an action, which can be legal or no. If it is impermissible to use "illegal immigrant", then it is also impermissible to call a physician or a plumber "unlicensed" because physicians and plumbers are humans, too, and it is outrageous to imply that one must be licensed in order to be human. I've been wanting to write this for months now, by the way. You sanctimonious PC Police with the poles up your holier-than-thou sphincters, come and get me.

Quick Thought

2009-03-19T17:24:00.000-05:00

As I write this, there are now five wild turkeys strutting up and down my property.

I would like very much to piss off Peter Singer and Ingrid Newkirk.

Besides, after having run in place for thirty minutes, I am hungry.

I am reconsidering my pacifist stance against guns or, for that matter, crossbows, truncheons, bludgeons, or even the use of shovels as deadly force.

Like I said, I am hungry.

Jus ad Bellum

2009-03-13T23:28:00.003-05:00

So, Mexico is now embroiled in a very, very bloody drug war. The drug lords are killing anyone who gets in their way. This war took the lives of 5,736 persons last year, and the death rate is only accelerating--1,000 during this past January alone. So, the Mexican Drug War has claimed far more lives than those that were lost on 9/11.

Now, 9/11, as everyone should know, was used to justify a war of retaliation, the Afghan War, and a war of prevention, the Iraq War. The rationale for the second war was this: Saddam Hussein has lots and lots of Weapons of Mass Distraction, and Saddam is an evil madman, Hitler on meth. There is no telling what he will do with his apocalyptic arsenal. He could open it up to all kinds of terrorists who want to visit even more 9/lls upon our poor, freedom-loving heads. We can't let another 9/11 happen. Therefore, we must destroy Saddam before he destroys us. Therefore, Shock and Awe. Therefore, fuck Iraq, and then we can sleep at night and continue to love freedom.

But Saddam did not attack us. He did not have those stockpiles of WMD, and he was not arming the terrorists threatening our oh so precious freedoms. But so what? Saddam was still a mad, evil monster who had used mustard gas on his own people and, even though he had no WMD left, he still knew how to make more and was planning to make more, because that's the nature of heinous dastardly villainous bastards like him. To prevent another 9/11 we had no choice but to take him out (and destroy Iraq and take its oil as well, but that's irrelevant; I don't know why, but the neo-cons say that it is).

Okay, so let's return now to the Mexican Drug War. Where are the Drug Lords and their goons getting the weapons that are now terrorizing the good people of Mexico? From Texas. They are getting their weapons from us because in our country it is easier for a murderous thug to acquire an arsenal than it is for a minor to buy a pack of smokes.

So, if it is fine and dandy for us to wage a preventive war against a country because a mad dictator just might give weapons to people who might attack us with them, then it is clear that Mexico has even more reason to attack and invade us. Whereas it was only paranoid imagination that Iraq would attack us or arm the terrorists who would attack us, it is not speculation at all to say we are arming the terrorists who are making Mexico a veritable bloodbath. It is a documented fact. If it is okay to ravage another country because of fear of what its mad dictator might do, then it is especially urgent to fight a country because of what its mad gun laws are actually doing.

Now, of course, Mexico won't attack us. They would get annihilated if they did, but in the light of our own theory of jihad, they would certainly die as righteous martyrs.

Carmen Catulli no. 51 (dedicated to dchan)

2009-03-10T18:55:00.002-05:00

Equal to a God he seems to me,
Or, if it be not blasphemy,
He surpasses all the Gods, too,
For he gets to sit next to you.

And listens to your sweet, sweet laughter,
Which rips all the sense out of me
For nothing is left thereafter,
When I see you, I prattle mindlessly.

But the tongue withers into blight,
From my weak joints my rage drips down,
My ears are jangled with her sound,
As my eyes blacken in the night.

Catull, leisure makes you rave and burn,
Leisure, Catull, is your disease,
Leisure has ruined kings in their turn,
And has destroyed many blessèd cities.

Socialism and Capitalism

2009-03-09T23:17:00.005-05:00

One of the tenets of Conservative Catholicism in these United States is the idea that the evils of abortion, contraception, and civil unions/gay "marriage" are intrinsic to socialism. That may be so, but why? If it is so, then it is because the socialist project, as we learn so clearly from Plato, is the replacement of the family by the state, and so the family must be wiped out in theory and in practice.

But these evils I would argue are also intrinsic to what Conservative Catholics have been duped by vile neo-con toads such as Michael Novak into defending as God's system, capitalism. The capitalist project, as we learn from Locke, is the unquenchable quest for joy in the amassing of wealth. This is what drives society, and so it must be a perpetual cycle. You can never have enough profit, you must always want more, because if you don't want more, you won't work for more, and then you will be overtaken by your competition and shunted back into the miserable proletariat (okay, fine, as we learn from Marx's interpretation of Locke).

(Oh, I must insert another inelegant parenthesis here to point out that it was precisely this mad competition for more that caused the current economic crisis. One bank wanted to get an edge on another bank by leveraging more, the other bank raised the stakes by leveraging even more, and so on and so forth until the rabid lunacy of banks leveraging 30-1 and then, presto, economic apocalypse that will force us to seek refuge with the Amish.)

Therefore, an ambition of constant Calliclean instability is the premise of capitalism, and, thus, the stability of the family must give way to it. Both socialism and capitalism must make war on the family because the telos of each is fundamentally at odds with that of the family.

So, what's my solution? I don't know. A return to medieval feudalism, perhaps?

We're fucked.

Response to Shanna Carpenter

2009-03-08T11:00:00.003-05:00

Because I am at home now, I cannot access facebook and, therefore, cannot respond to Miss Carpenter's latest volley in our rather acrimonious debate, at least not on facebook. I can respond here and I will do so in the hope Miss Carpenter will see the response when it is threaded through to my facebook site. This note is meant for Miss Carpenter and others who have happened to have follow our debate on facebook. Those who have not will, of course, not be to contextualize the response below. My apologies to them.

My Response to Miss Carpenter:

Yes, I should have known that Brazil has much stricter laws against abortion than we do, and good for them. But my point still stands. The principle being upheld is that one may not do evil so that good may happen. This is the basis of morality. If you drop this principle, then you open the door to pragmatism, the premise of which ultimately is nothing but might makes right. I will concede that this particular case is an agonizingly hard one, of course, but even though it seems utterly heartless to say and makes me sound like Ian August Mosley, it still remains true that morality of hard cases makes for bad law. And it remains true that what you are arguing for is nothing less than the justification of the deliberate killing of an innocent human life, and that disgusts me as much as my position sickens you.

Peter Sloterdijk on Social Networking Sites (e.g. facebook)

2009-03-06T06:14:00.002-06:00

"The retreat from others, the permission to be alone, that is the great achievement of individualism. But the human being is a tribal creature as well. These Web Networks can happily unite both: One can be free of the annoying, obstreperous others, yet the entire tribe is always present."

Well, Herr Sloterdijk has obviously confounded "present" with "virtually present", which may or may not signify a genuine human presence. One can never know. The Internet is truly the world of Kantian Appearances. There is no way to have real knowledge of the thing itself behind the screens and terminals unless, of course, people meet "offline". But then, if that happens, Sloterdijk's "happy union" of liberal deracination with optional tribalism disappears. The other suddenly becomes real. The words and pixels become flesh, and the tribe then is a concrete obligation. If these social networking sites are the pinnacle of liberal individualism, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, then liberal individualism is indeed a gnostic heresy. This is obvious, of course. The internet just makes the obvious glaring.

Social Networking Sites are Singles Bars where accidental commitments can at last be utterly screened out with certain, scientific precision, but doing so screens out the human being and leaves nothing but an illusion thereof in his stead.

Give me your best pitch

2009-03-04T18:11:00.003-06:00

Convert me:

If you're an atheist, tell me why I should be as well, and why I must regard Sisyphus as happy. For those of you who didn't catch the allusion, Sisyphus was a man condemned by the gods to roll a great big rock up a hill, whence it would fall back again on its own weight, and Sisyphus would have to start all over again, and so on for eternity. Albert Camus, the colonialist atheist, took Sisyphus' fate to be the lot of modern, godless man. And the only truly philosophical question for modern, godless man is why he should not slit his wrists. Camus' answer is "The Myth of Sisyphus", believe it or not. Because there is no god, life has no meaning. Life is, thus, absurd. It is as pointless as Sisyphus' punishment, and yet Camus claims Sisyphus to be happy because, well, he chooses to be, I suppose. He manages to yank meaning out of sheer bitchery. How? Tell me this, and I might, just might consider converting to Atheism.

Of course, many Atheist would deny the premise of Camus' essay and assert that godlessness does not equate to absurdity. Well, I really do not know how one can defend this claim. If there is no God, then our world, our lives, everything around us is not the result of an intent. It is ultimately the result of chance, and any meaning we discover is really as fabricated as Atheists say the fairy tales about God are. But I could be wrong. If so, tell me, please.

If you are Wahabist Muslim, please, tell me why I should give up beer and gazing at young women in skimpy bikinis. Tell me why I should worship a very boring book. Tell me why the Koran was not just an excuse for Mohammed to fuck lots of women. And, while you're at it, what's my motivation for belief if I happen to prefer Blue-Eyed Virgins to Dark-Eyed Virgins?

If you are a Mormon, answer me this: may I exchange the planet I get as a reward for not smoking, not drinking, and liking the Osmonds for a library and several cartons of Camel Filters? I really don't want to rule a planet. I would probably make a botch of it, provoke a revolution, and be overthrown and beheaded. So, may I have a library without being a god? Like Nietzsche I'd rather be a scholar than a god.

If you are Wiccan, tell me what is the fun of being a witch without having the ability to turn someone into a newt or to render someone unable to utter anything expect Abba Songs?

If you're an episcopalian, answer me this: may I then believe in anything as long as I drink Gin & Tonic and think John Meacham is profound?

If you are Unitarian, tell me: may I still believe in the certainty of basic arithmetic or would that make me too much of a fundamentalist?

If you are a Sarah Palin groupie, would you please tell me how expensive your lobotomy was and if it hurt at all.

Oh, and if you are a Catholic who still thinks the Iraq War was a textbook example of a Just War--a war that has killed about a million Iraqis, displaced millions more, driven a hundred thousand women and girls into prostitution and sex slavery, has produced more starving children than even the brutal decade-long regime of economic sanctions did--tell me exactly why people like you do not give Catholicism a worse name than buggering priests or, well, vile, disgusting middle-aged leches like me?

If you are Protestant, would you please tell me why Luther was right and David Koresh was wrong or vice versa.

Gay Porn Fluffer

2009-02-28T08:32:00.001-06:00

I guess I should post something simply because I have not posted anything for days. That's because I'm in a bit of a funk. My one and only true love still not requite my stubbornly, obstinately, and adamantly undying love for her. She will not even answer my e-mails. My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. Vae mihi!. On top of that my Greek sucks. Really sucks. I mistook what was clearly and unequivocally an aorist participle for a future participle and failed completely to recognize the second principle part of diaphero. Those are boners that a callow first-year Greek major makes. Geez. I feel more guilty about doing that than all my sordid sins of self-abuse. I am an incorrigible pagan, trying to be Catholic, after all.

Speaking of religion, I guess I should explain why, as I assert boldly on my MySpace profile, I would rather be a gay porn fluffer than a Protestant. Don't get me wrong. I agree with the Catholic Church that the homosexual orientation is, yes, intrinsically disordered and that homosexual acts are always gravely wrong (just like acts of self-abuse). And, yes, I believe gay "marriage" is an abomination which should not be allowed to have legal recognition. If you want to call me a "homophobe", knock yourself out.

Now, it should be noted that Protestantism, the various varieties of Arminianism excepted, denies humans of free will. In the Protestant scheme of things, we are robots. And yet when it comes to homosexuality, the great majority of Evangelicals will insist that this orientation is a choice and not a determined condition. Okay, well, if that's the case then, the Evangelical Protestants have excepted homosexuals from their deterministic theology, and so even though I would never want to be a gay porn fluffer, I have to say that it would sure beat being a divinely pre-set robot

so, wacko libertarians, what say you?

2009-02-17T19:10:00.004-06:00

So, are there any libertarians around who still think privatizing the court system is a smashing idea? If so, then I really would like them to explain to me why this would not be the result. If you want freedom for all, you have to have justice for all, and justice cannot be administered by anything else than an institution accountable to the common good and nothing but. Justice becomes tyranny if it is answerable to the personal profit motive (what saner ages called greed) and would certainly deserve much more than sniggering ridicule on some mischievous adolescent's MySpace page. Its true desert is nothing less than outright mass rebellion.

Further evidence that radical libertarians should be--for the sake of the very thing they disdain, the common good--straitjacketed or, at the very least, made to register as if they were vile sex offenders and not allowed to rest their perverted little heads even in flophouses or under highway overpasses.

Latin Lesson at St. Louis University High School in St. Louis

2009-02-15T15:43:00.004-06:00

"Mitte gladium in vaginam"--John 18:11

One day during Sophomore Latin class the then Jesuit Scholastic Mr. O'Liddy gave us a quiz with no extra credit. My High School was and is, to be sure, a Jesuit Institution and, therefore, supposedly Catholic. But it was and is first and foremost a Prep School, where the annual number of National Merit Scholars has always been much more important than the number of sacraments, more important than even the number of persons in the Holy Trinity (and, of course, far more important than the number of Commandments; it was, I repeat, a Jesuit institution). In other words, academic competitiveness was religion, and redemption was to be found in a respectable GPA which would in turn open the gates of paradise, an Ivy League University or, at least, a college that bribed U.S. News and World Report. We were indoctrinated always to devote ourselves to the pursuit of the academic edge, however small, however petty, however ridiculous. And, so, when Mr. O'Liddy did not offer extra credit on that day's quiz, we could only regard that as utter blasphemy and did what devout Preppies are supposed to do: we whined.

And, so, Mr. O'Liddy relented to this petulant Inquisition of roiling hormones. He went to the chalkboard and drew a sword and then, right next to it, drew its sheath. The sword, it should be noted, was pointing right at the ready and willing opening of the sheath. "Okay," he said drily, "give me the Latin word for this thing here," and he pointed to the sheath. The whining stopped. Prep school orthodoxy returned. We took the quiz.

A few minutes later Mr. O'Liddy told us time was up and requested that I collect the quizzes. As I was collecting the quizzes, our Magister asked if any one got the extra credit. Blank stares. Then he asked me specifically because I was the Latin Geek. I was good at Latin, I must say (in contradistinction to now; my Latin really sucks now), one can be good at Latin and not be an annoying public nerd about it (I have always had a problem restraining my public nerdity). Anyway, I did not know, either, what the Latin word for sword sheath was.

Mr. O'Liddy sighed. He turned to the chalkboard, said with another sigh, "You guys have no imagination," and proceeded to write in great big huge capital letters:

V-A-G-I-N-A

Needless to say, the class of not so wise foolish fifteen-year-olds released lots and lots of sublimation. The Freudian symbolism of Mr. O'Liddy's drawing now was, of course, achingly obvious, even though none of us had even read Freud. True, none of us got the extra credit, but at that moment we had visions other than that of collegiate success in our heads, of course. Worries about academic redemption gave way to more primary concerns, and the raucous laughter continued unabated.

And then Donna walked in, the Assistant Principle's Secretary. At my All Boys' High School she was the only young woman we got to see during the day. Well, not the only one. There was a teacher of Algebra who was fairly young. She was also fairly ugly. She looked like a rake with a nose and hair. Donna was the only young woman we saw whom we actually wanted to see, and when she walked in, the class quite predictably asked about her sword sheath. Some even were bold enough to request seeing it. The future priest was chagrined at what he had unleashed, and when Donna left, he scolded us for our oh so ungentlemanly "catcalls". Some of us did blush. I know I did (No, really I did). Most did not care, and Mr. O'Liddy, having learned that hormone-based pedagogy was very dangerous indeed, proceeded to give us an especially unexciting lecture on the Ablative Absolute.

So, this story illustrates both the joys and the dangers of an All Boys' Prep School. There was no way Mr. O'Liddy could have given that sort of Extra Credit at a co-educational institution. He would have been immediately dismissed, if he had. But even at a Boys' Club like St. Louis University High School, he should have hung a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door for Donna's sake.

Mr. O'Liddy later told me this gem: "I like Sophomores, and I like Latin, but the two do not go together at all."

Der Spiegel, the Pope, and Genocide

2009-02-13T01:12:00.003-06:00

Recently Der Spiegel, Germany's weekly dose of sanctimony, did a cover story on the Pope's lifting of the SSPX excommunications. As everyone should know by now, one of the Bishops affected was none other than that Holocaust-denying lunatic Richard Williamson. Der Spiegel was outraged. Holocaust denial, if it is not the sin against the Holy Spirit, then it is certainly the sin against the Spirit of the Times, and, of course, that Spirit trumps the other these days. To revoke the excommunication of a Holocaust denier sends a message that such an obvious monster is fit for civilized society, and that just undermines the very meaning of civilization. The Pope should know this. That he apparently does not means that he is clueless, out of touch, too caught up in his theological Ivory Tower to be bothered by obvious reality or fabricated scandals, which for Der Spiegel is one and the same.

Let me be very clear. I've thought Williamson was deranged ever since I learned about him, and I wish I never did learn about him. Unfortunately one cannot avoid knowing something about the SSPX if one is drawn to the Latin Mass Movement, and I was. Because I like Latin. And there are many who attend Latin Mass for just that simple of a reason. And then there are many others who attend Latin Mass because they think the Mass in the vernacular is Satanic and that the Pope is an android controlled by the Masons, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission. These are the wackjobs who take the likes of a Williamson seriously. They made me bitterly regret my fondness for Gregorian Chant.

Now, as I have stated previously in this space, I think it is better to try to get the wackjobs back into the Church where they can be told to shut up than to be left out in the secular world to be loud and obnoxious. The Catholic Church still has the Inquisition. It goes under a different name, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but it is still the Inquisition, and it does a somewhat better job of shutting people up than do the conniption fits of Der Spiegel.

One of the reasons why it does a somewhat better job is that it actually believes in something, and Der Spiegel believes in nothing. Its hatchet job on the Pope actually had the temerity to blast Ratzinger for, among other things, having denounced relativism! Everyone knows that relativism is reality, everyone, that is, except the clueless Pope (who must have canceled his subscription to Der Spiegel). Fine. Relativism holds that every claim is nothing more than an opinion. The claim that the Holocaust happened is an opinion and so is the claim that it did not. So, how does Der Spiegel justify its outrage? Simply by its wide circulation, I guess.

In a world where relativism is reality, only force can determine the truth. That's why everyone goes in a tizzy when there is news about a Holocaust denier; the Holocaust Industry has lots of clout. Please, don't misunderstand my point. I think denying the Holocaust is as loony as denying, say, basic arithmetic. It's obvious that the Holocaust happened, and anyone who says otherwise is irrational.

But why does Holocaust Denial get all the attention, eh? Why is it so evil and heinous and unspeakable to deny the Holocaust when to this day Turkey puts people into jail for saying that that country massacred more than a million Armenians in 1915? Turkey to this day denies an obvious historical fact, and yet Turkey is a member of the putatively civilized society of NATO. A resolution in the U.S. Congress to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide failed to pass out of concern for the feelings of our good friend and ally, genocidal Turkey. So, why can no one get away with denying the Holocaust but Turkey is allowed to deny the Armenian Genocide when both horrors are established historical facts? Simple. The Armenian Lobby is not nearly as strong as the Holocaust Lobby. Force determines truth.

A brief thought on Platonism and the PNP project

2009-02-08T16:46:00.001-06:00

The Platonic claim on behalf of the soul is that it is the seat of knowledge. Okay, so what of the PNP Project ('PNP' stands for Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology, but it actually means the prostitution of philosophy on the couch of corporate money) which seeks to show that the mind is simply the body, that indeed the human being is simply his body und Nichts außerdem, and, thus, that terms like 'mind' and 'soul' are nothing but phantasms? A Platonist would say that if a scientist seeks to show that he has no soul, then he is therefore seeking to show that he has no seat of knowledge. Ergo, the scientist is attempting to show that he cannot be a scientist. In other words, from a Platonic perspective, the PNP Project is inherently contradictory and can only be regarded as absurd. Too bad there aren't many Platonist Chairs in Philosophy Departments nowadays.

Some Obvious Thoughts on the Suspension of Michael Phelps

2009-02-06T21:29:00.002-06:00

Michael Phelps has been suspended from professional swimming for three months for having taken a bong hit. The Fascist Swimming commission wanted thereby to send a message: Stoners are immoral canker sores that give professional sports a bad (worse, actually) name, and their naughty, naughty behaviour that shocks the conscience of the Innocent Unstoned American Soul will not be tolerated! Well, at least, not for the next three months.

And Kellogg's dropped Phelps as a spokesman. Stupid business decision, actually. Kellogg's passed up a golden opportunity to corner the stoners' munchies market. The company could have aired ads showing Phelps, sprawled out on a tie-dyed couch, reaching clumsily for a box of Wheaties amidst a litter of bongs, joint butts, and roach clips. Kellogg's stock would have soared. But, alas, it's not to be. American Business does not profit from immoral behaviour, as long as it is not the exploitation of child labour, insider trading, union busting, arson, loan-sharking, overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with murderous, Milton Friedman worshipping dictators, raiding pension funds, and, of course, outright theft.

That's how evil even one lousy fucking bong hit is, Kiddies! So, just say no!

But you know what is the most farcical about all this? Michael Phelps apologized! He should not have apologized. He should have pointed out what every one who has ever toked knows, namely that Marijuana is not dangerous, that it won't make you kill anyone or put you in the thrall of some Demonic Cult that practices human sacrifice, etc. If faced with the choice of being driven home by a drunk or a stoner, you would probably be wise to sleep in the park, but if you have to make the choice, chances are that the stoner will get you to your bed safe and sound while the drunk will likely get you on a slab.

We have laws against Marijuana simply because 3M in the 1930s wanted the competition from Hemp Paper squelched and because it is the Mexicans' drug of choice, and this xenophobic country has a history of demonizing all non-WASPS. The laws remain on the books because without them, Police Officers would have one fewer excuse to beat the shit out of blacks and have one less source of extra income.

Laws against Marijuana are simply STUPID, and Michael Phelps, were he not a pathetic coward, should have said so. He should have also said that it is no virtue to obey a law, the stupidity of which is so obvious that even Police Officers don't even bother enforcing it (except, of course, when they need an excuse to beat an impecunious minority up--see above)! Michael Phelps may swim like a fish, but he is obviously not one; even fish have tougher spines than his.

So, Phelps has been suspended for a bong hit, and the moral order of this country has been restored. Our former president lied us into war, gave the greenlight to torture, suspended habeas corpus, tried--in an Eric Honecker moment--to get neighbor to spy on neighbor, and put this entire country under a 1984-like surveillance. Sounds like outrageous,immoral behaviour to me. Yet, never once was he "suspended", and chances are quite good (thanks to his successor's pusillanimity) that he will never be prosecuted for his many and obvious abuses of power. And instead of American Business keeping its distance from his sorry, demonic ass, publishing companies will be bidding for his subliterate memoirs.

America's ethical priorities are truly fucked, and this country is supposed to be the Shining City on the Hill?

Sure, man, I'll believe that. Just let me toke up.

Oh, and by the way, if you look to an athlete for guidance in virtue, you are an idiot.

The National Prayer Breakfast

2009-02-06T01:33:00.004-06:00

Before the President launched into his formal remarks, he praised Bush's poodle, a.k.a. Tony Blair for his leadership. That's like praising the Italian Army for its bravery (by the way, here's a brief Italian Soldier Joke: Ad for an Italian Rifle: only dropped once). Blair was nothing more than a tool, first for Thatcherism and then for, of course, the neo-con brand of American Imperialism. English Prime Ministers of yore were at least manly (and, yes, Thatcher was really a man) enough to stand for their own bloody Imperialism. Blair was not a leader; he was the Yankee's catamite. (This particular weblog's spell check incidentally does not recognize "catamite"; whether this is a good thing, I really do not know.)

So, Mr. Obama talked about about what binds all the great religions and philosophies of the world. It is none other than the Golden Rule. Love thy neighbor as thy self, as Jesus Christ put it. If we just all understood this, then religious strife and rancorous division would cease, and we would all be one big happy, harmonious family. Understanding is, as the President put it, a healing power and spreading it around the world will vanquish the forces of destructive zealotry.

Is that why Mr. Obama continues to bomb the bejeebers out of Western Pakistan?

It is just another myth of the Enlightenment that understanding will bring peace. Germany in the 1930s was perhaps the most educated country in the history of the planet. The Germans with their scientists, their universities, and, of course, their philosophers understood quite a lot. That did not prevent Hitler's rise to power.

Regarding religious matters, one can easily argue that rather than overcoming antagonisms, understanding actually exacerbates and magnifies them. I have met only a few devout Muslims, but they all seemed to me quite pleasant. One was even quite fetching (well, what she allowed me to see, at any rate). But then I tried to understand what they devoutly believe. I read the Koran, and the Koran says explicitly that my belief in the Incarnation of God is a monstrous heresy. Well, fuck you, too, and so much for the healing power of understanding.

But the President is suggesting that these theological differences pale when one considers that in matters of morality, all religions and philosophies are the same. Any devout Christian would certainly object to the notion that the chief aim of Faith is for all of us to live in moral harmony with one another here on earth. Such a notion is nothing short of Pelagian Blasphemy. Human beings cannot of their own strength make earth into heaven, and, in fact, earth is not supposed to be made into heaven. The glory of the world will pass into dust. The Christian believes not because of any ethical code. The Christian believes because he wants something more than this earthly life can ever provide even with Barack Obama as President. He wants eternal bliss.

Nevertheless, let us say arguendo that the essence and purpose of Religion is the Golden Rule. Where the deuce does that get us? I certainly do not want a Masochist loving me as he loves himself. The Golden Rule begs the question of anthropology, of "What is the Human Being", and as long as that question remains unanswered, the Golden Rule is nothing more than subjectivist drivel. Mr. Obama can say, for instance, that this Rule forbids the killing of innocent humans, but his personal, subjective beliefs exclude babies in the womb and the peasants of Western Pakistan from this category, and so he can bomb away and be an infanticidal maniac without any compunction and still be a sweet talker about the Golden Rule.

Mr. Obama's prayer was as meaningless as that jingle about buying the world a Coke and keeping it company. Of course, that jingle sold a lot of Coke, and Obama's sonorous but superficial eloquence has obviously been good for what Noam Chomsky has aptly called Brand Obama. It makes people feel good.

A concise definition of neo-con

2009-02-04T20:58:00.002-06:00

Many people have for months, if not years, asked me for a concise definition of "neo-con". I have come up with several, none of which have proved entirely satisfactory. I have variously defined "neo-con" as a worshipper of Leo Strauß, a former Trostkyite who has abandoned Trostky's economics but not his universalism, a closet atheistic cynic who wants the unwashed masses to be religious so that they will not steal from the rich and will think it their pious duty to die in the latter's wars, etc.

While all these definitions do have some truth to them, I have come up with yet another one that I think really captures the neo-con essence, and it is a definition that I think would even have the Papal Imprimatur

Neo-con: English for jihadi.

Anthropology 101, a somewhat loose and tendentious translation of a snippet from Alcibiades I

2009-01-30T13:40:00.002-06:00

Socrates: Come then, in what manner would the ideal form of the self be discovered? Perhaps, then, we can discover whatever it is we ourselves are, but now we are ignorant of it and thus unable to do so.

Alcibiades: You speak orthodoxy.

Socrates: Hold your horses, by Zeus! With whom are you having a dialectic? Is it anybody else but me?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: And is it therefore the case that I am having a dialectic with you?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Is Socrates then the dialectician?

Alcibiades: Sure thing.

Socrates: And Alcibiades the passive, pathetic, oafish listener?

Alcibiades: Yup.

Socrates: And does Socrates make his dialectic with words?

Alcibiades: Oh, indeed he does! Lots of 'em.

Socrates: And do you call making a dialectic and using words the same?

Alcibiades: Sure.

Socrates: Are not the user and the things which he uses different?

Alcibiades: How do you mean?

Socrates: As, say, the cobbler cuts with a straight edge and a round edge and other tools.

Alcibiades: Okay.

Socrates: So, is it not the case that both the cutter and the user are one category, and the things which the cutter uses another?

Alcibiades: How would that not be the case?

Socrates: And so in this way the things which a harpist uses to harp would also be different from the harpist himself?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Accordingly I asked you just now whether the user always appears to be different from the things which he uses.

Alcibiades: It appears so.

Socrates: What, then, are we going to say about the cobbler? That he uses only his tools or his hands as well?

Alcibiades: He uses his hands as well.

Socrates: And so he uses those things as well?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: And would you say that the user really uses his eyes as well when cobbling?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Did we not agree that the user and the things used are different?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Then are the cobbler and the harpist different from the hands and eyes that they employ?

Alcibiades: It seems so.

Socrates: Does not the human being thus use all of his body?

Alcibiades: Sure.

Socrates: But the user and the things used are two different categories?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Then the human being is different from his own body?

Alcibiades: Apparently.

Socrates: So, what the hell is the human being?

Alcibiades: I cannot say.

Socrates: But you can say that he is the user of his body, n'est-ce pas?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Ergo, is it not truly the case that the thing doing the exploitation is nothing else than the soul?

Alcibiades: Nothing else.

Socrates: Is it not, therefore, controlling?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: And I suppose that no one would think of this otherwise.

Alcibiades: Of what?

Socrates: That indeed the human being must be some one of three things.

Alcibiades: And what would those things be?

Socrates: Either the soul, the body, or a synthesis of the two.

Alcibiades: Sure thing.

Socrates: But did we not clearly agree that the human being is certainly the ruler of his body?

Alcibiades: We did agree.

Socrates: Well, then, does the body itself rule itself?

Alcibiades: In no way.

Socrates: For we did say that the body is ruled.

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: This would, then, clearly not be the thing we are seeking, eh?

Alcibiades: Apparently not.

Socrates: But then, perhaps, a synthesis of body and soul rules the body, and it is this that truly is the human being?

Alcibiades: Certainly, maybe.

Socrates: Indeed this is the least probable of all. For presumably there is no way, if one component of the synthesis is not ruling, that the synthesis as a whole can rule.

Alcibiades: Damn straight.

Socrates: And so, since neither the body nor a synthesis of body and soul is the human being, I suppose that leaves us with no other conclusion than either this thing is nothing or if it is indeed something, then the human being can have no other foundation than the soul.

Alcibiades: Quod erat demonstrandum

This is driving me nuts

2009-01-28T22:43:00.002-06:00

Yet again have I heard yet another newscaster say that the Illinois Senate may vote to impeach the governor as early as tomorrow. More proof that anchors need only be easy on the eyes and have passable diction.

They certainly do not have to know any history--even history of, say, the preceding few weeks--, need not have passed a grade school civics class, or know the English Language. For if they were required to know these things, they would know that Governor Blagojevich has already been impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives, that the House impeaches and the Senate convicts, and that "impeach" simply means "to accuse" or "to charge".

An impeachment is simply a charge against a public official, and it is the duty of the House to vote to charge a public official with high crimes and misdemeanors. It is the duty of the Senate to consider whether these charges are true and accordingly vote for conviction or acquittal.

This ain't rocket science. You are supposed to learn this in grade school. Newscasters are just talking mannequins.

Sarah Palin was a news anchor, by the way.

Luther's Bondage of the Will (re-post for the benefit of the other Mr. Mosley)

2009-01-28T18:33:00.003-06:00

[I re-post this brief review of Bondage of the Will simply for the benefit of an evangelical acquaintance of mine on facebook. On his profile he describes himself as "intellectually evangelical". I wrote on his 'wall' that 'intellectual evangelicalism' is oxymoronic nonsense because evangelical protestantism is predicated upon a contempt for the human intellect.

This did not sit well with my acquaintance, needless to say. He asked me how the devil could Evangelicals have contempt for the one thing that allows one to choose faith. I could only respond, "Precisely, one cannot disdain the intellect and remain coherent," implying, obviously, that evangelical Protestantism is incoherent. I added also that this incoherence results directly from the classic Protestant Doctrine of Total Depravity, which holds that the Fall has utterly blotted out the human ability to choose the good.

Well, the other Mr. Mosley accused me of misunderstanding said Doctrine and then quoted the Westminster Confession at me to the effect that the fallen human will can still choose natural goods even though it cannot choose supernatural ones. Therefore, the Doctrine of Total Depravity does indeed allow the unaided human intellect some power for the good, and, thus, it was wrong of me to claim that Evangelical Protestantism has nothing but contempt for reason. "Check and mate," this intellectually evangelical man ended triumphantly.

Well, not so fast, Mr. Intellectual Evangelical. Calvinism, of which the Westminster Confession is an expression (and a very tedious one at that), holds that the truly good man is the regenerate man, the man that has been saved, and the bad man is the one who goes to hell. What makes the good man good and the bad man bad? God's mysterious whim and that's it. Thus, good and bad has nothing but nothing to do with reason and everything to do with some omnipotent tyrant's capricious will.

If good and bad in the supernatural realm, then, have nothing to do with reason, then how can reason have anything to do with the natural good and bad? Are there two truths, then? Reason matters for this life but not for the next? If that is so, then reason can only be a temporal good, but the Evangelical is supposed to look to eternity, and in eternity reason has no place. It is utterly useless. In the Calvinist theological scheme, reason is obviously nugatory, and if this is not a blatant contempt for reason, I have no idea what is.

Of course, one can argue that Calvinism is not the basis of Evangelical Protestantism. Fine. There are basically two sources for Protestantism, Calvinism and Lutheranism. Lutheranism has the same contempt for reason as I demonstrate below.

(A Baptist might argue that he is neither in the Calvinist or Lutheran tradition. Well, fine, but it so well known that Baptist is synonymous with anti-intellectual that it is unnecessary to discuss the intellectual heritage of the Baptist Sect--as if there were any, that is.)--PSR]

In the chapter before the conclusion of On the Bondage of the Will, Luther belches out this rather shocking paragraph:

"Only observe, therefore, the simplicity of the words By the law is the knowledge of sin; and yet, these alone are of force sufficient to confound and overthrow Free-will altogether. For if it be true, that of itself, it knows not what is sin, and what is evil, as the apostle saith here, and Rom. vii. 7-8, I should not have known that concupiscence was sin, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet, how can it ever know what is righteousness and good? And if it know not what righteousness is, how can it endeavour to attain unto it? We know not the sin in which we were born, in which we live, in which we move and exist (emphasis mine), and which lives, moves, and reigns in us; how then should we know that righteousness which is without us, and which reigns in heaven? These works bring that miserable thing Free-will to nothing nothing at all!"

Buried in a relative clause is Luther's astonishing claim sin is the thing in which we live, move, and exist. It is hard to tell whether Luther here is simply guilty of a rhetorical excess or is really claiming that the ontological make-up of man is utterly and completely evil. If the latter, then the obvious question is how do we reconcile this claim with St. Paul's claim of precisely the opposite in Acts 17:28? Also, if man's very ontology is rooted in sin, then what of the Imago Dei, in which the book of Genesis tells us God created man and woman? According to Luther the Imago peccati has wholly supplanted it.

I claim that this is not a rhetorical excess. In his zeal to pulverize Erasmus and all his claims on behalf of Free Will, Luther is forced to deny man as a rational creature. Even if he makes the slightest acknowledgement of man's ability to reason, he has given Erasmus that tiny bit of free will that he had been arguing for all along. It is after all man's ability to reason that allows him to make free choices. To deny free will, therefore, Dr. Luther must deny reason. To deny this he must invert St. Paul's claim at Athens and thereby deny that man still retains any image of God in which God originally created him. Hence, Luther's assertion that man's ontology is not just wounded but entirely depraved is not, I argue, simply overheated polemic but the unavoidable consequence of his argument.

It is rather ironic that many Protestants will now object to Darwinian Theory because of the perception that this theory denies God's special creation of man. The founder of Protestantism staked his entire dispute with Rome on an argument that made this special creation of man by God null and void! By denying free will and by extension reason, Lutheran anthropology makes man at best no better than a brute who can only act on his basest instincts. Darwin says merely that we are descended from brutes. Protestantism says we are brutes.

Martin Luther was a madman.

Richard Williamson, reconciled and silenced--finally!

2009-01-28T00:52:00.001-06:00

I have been asked to divulge my thoughts about the recent reconciliation of the Pope with four renegade Bishops, one of whom is a Holocaust Denier, Bishop Richard Williamson, The Leftist Media have none too subtly suggested that this confirms what they have known all along, namely that the Pope is a Nazi and the Catholic Church is viciously anti-Semitic.

The Pope is not a Nazi. The Catholic Church is not anti-Semitic. The Church has been trying to reconcile with these four bishops for the better part of two decades. Why? For two very big reasons. These four bishops were leading hundreds of thousands of devout Catholics into schism. The Catholic Church is more concerned about their spiritual well-being than she is for the status of those self-important, mitred dissidents. The second reason was to shut the lunatic Williamson up, and this very thing happened just a few hours ago. The ringleader of the Four, to be sure, gave a pathetic non-apology apology for Williamson's lunacies, but the important thing is that Bernard Fellay told that fucking whacko to shut the fuck up.

This would not have happened had the reconciliation not occurred. Williamson has been making insane pronouncements for too many years, and never has Fellay censured him. No, Fellay had to be prodded by the Pope to do what needed to be done more than a decade ago. Williamson has said among other things that watching the Sound of Music will destroy the foundations of the family, that women should not attend university, and that women who wear trousers are putting their souls at risk of eternal hellfire. This man is certifiable, but what's really nuts is that many people were taking this maniac seriously. To too many Catholics Williamson was the voice of tradition just like Osama bin Laden is for many Muslims. I am, as my readers should know, a Catholic Traditionalist and did not like it all that a madman like Williamson was giving Catholic Tradition a very bad and ugly name. I desperately wanted someone to silence him, but as long as he was in schism, he could not be silenced because we no longer have Catholic States enforcing the Inquisition. You have to be in the Church to be silenced by the Church nowadays, and that is why the Pope reconciled with these Four Bishops. Would the permanently Sanctimonious Left have preferred Williamson to have remained in Schism, thereby remaining free to let hundreds of thousands of his followers to think that Holocaust Denial is part of Catholic Tradition? I do not think so.

Of course, Williamson may yet renege on the deal with Rome and go back into Schism. If he does, I hope the German authorities do charge him with Holocaust Denial and that he rots in a German Prison.

What is Libertarianism?

2009-01-23T21:26:00.001-06:00

What exactly is Libertarianism? I want to get as precise a definition of the concept as I can before I bash the hell out of it. And not because I want a new bone of contention between my Stalker in Transition and myself. I must admit that I relished our rancorous arguments. After all, I have not been laid in seventeen years and have to get my yahs yahs out somehow.

But all those brainwashed worshippers of Israel, otherwise known as Evangelicals, provide more than enough outlet for my pent-up sexual energy. And they are funny, too, in a pathetic, grotesque sort of way. I say, "Israel is a terrorist state for bombing schools and killing women and children," and then they say, "You are anti-Semitic; does it bother you that Jesus was a Jew?" And then comes the real, scary whopper: "If Jesus were alive today, He would be the leader of the Likud Party, calling for the Final Solution in Gaza." And I say, "If you are real Christians, I want to be pagan." And that just confirms for them that they were right all along: Catholics really are unregenerate, hellbound pagans.

I light up a fag, take a long drag, and enjoy the afterglow of once again demonstrating the utter absurdity of American Evangelical Christianity: Evangelicals defied the authority of Rome only to become Israel's useful idiots.

But I digress. As I was saying I don't want to bash the hell out of Libertarianism because I want to antagonize my Stalker. No, I want to bash Libertarianism because it should be bashed. Libertarianism, as I understand it, is the doctrine that individual liberty should be at a maximum and government coercion should be at a minimum and pursuant to this goal, government must confine itself to simply protecting the people against force and fraud.

Okay, but how the deuce do you define "force" and "fraud". That's the big question. If, for instance, you define force as outright violence and fraud as an outright lie, then government's duty is simply to provide a police force, a court system, national defense, and that's it. But if you define force as, say, including all the blind and cruel whimsies of the market's Invisible Hand and fraud as anything that is deceitful or misleading, then government obviously has a very big role in regulating commerce, providing a social safety net, and seeing to it that the claims that the pharmaceutical companies make on behalf of all their drugs are on the up and up.

Of course, on this enlarged definition of "force and fraud", you get what the classic Libertarian most dreads, the Nanny State. This is precisely the problem of Libertarianism, though: it's premises are so vague as to allow precisely what it claims to oppose with every last whine from the Cato Institute. But I could be very wrong, of course, and that is why I am asking my Libertarian Readers to supply me with a much more precise definition of their plans for a utopia of individual liberty, and then I can bash the hell out of that, too.

By the way, shouldn't a Libertarian be opposed to the very idea of a definition? After all, a definition in order to function as such must be limiting and communal and, hence, is utterly incompatible with individual liberty. Sounds like the Road to Serfdom and godless Communism to me.

Olbermann's odd blindspot

2009-01-20T09:52:00.001-06:00

Alarmed at recent suggestions by Mr. Obama and his minions that the next administration would not prosecute Bush and his lackeys for the obvious war crime of torture, Keith Olbermann in his Special Comment last night urged the New President not to give the Bushies a free pass on this particular atrocity. Doing so will only give future administrations, be they Republican or Democrat, a green light to indulge in worse misdeeds. Well, I am glad to see that Mr. Olbermann included the Obama Adminstration in this dire warning, albeit indirectly. After months of his show being an infomercial for the Obama Campaign, it is a relief to see that Mr. Olbermann has sobered up a bit from all that Kool-Aid. And if he can do it, perhaps there is hope for all the other Obamamaniacs out there.

But, alas, Mr. Olbermann has sobered up only a bit. He still seems to think along with the rest of mainstream media that because this country's New President can actually utter complete sentences, he must be amenable to reason. Surely a professed student of political history as Mr. Olbermann should know better. Politics is not about reason. It is about power. Obama's campaign slogan was utterly blatant about this point. "Yes, we can!" is nothing other than an expression of raw, unadulterated, unchecked power.

If Obama prosecutes the Bushies for having used their power to commit atrocities, he will have to acknowledge constraints on his power, and then he would have to change his slogan to "No, we can't." If Bush can't abuse Power, Obama can't either. Therefore, he would have to renege on his promise to bomb Pakistan. He would have to appoint another Director of Intelligence, someone who, unlike Dennis Blair, did not reward Indonesian Generals for having massacred Catholics in East Timor. He would have to appoint a Secretary of State who has not promised to rubberstamp Israel's genocidal policies, etc., etc.

And why, Mr. Olbermann, did you focus on merely the crime of torture? Yes, I am outraged that the Bush Administration has commited torture in your name and mine and, thereby, has brought your country and mine into disgrace. But that's not the only thing that has disgraced this great land of ours, Mr. Olbermann. That's not even Bush's greatest crime. As evil as torture is, lying us into an unjust war that has killed millions of innocents, made refugees out of millions more, and driven countless women and girls into prostitution and slavery is far more evil. You, Mr. Olbermann, have made it your crusade to damn Bush in Special Comment after Special Comment for having lied this country into war. You have made it your cause to do everything in your power to see to it that the Anti-Christ Bush did not lie us into another war with Iran, and yet in your latest Special Comment you made no mention of Bush's Greatest Crime at all.

By your argument, if Obama does not prosecute Bush for torture, Obama will thereby encourage future administrations to torture. Are we to conclude by your omission of Bush's lying us into war, you want Obama and other administrations to continue to lie us into war? Silence, after all, gives consent, and, I repeat, about Bush's Greatest Crime, the Big Lie that you have bitched about for half a decade now, you were oddly and deafeningly silent.

A Modest Proposal

2009-01-14T12:29:00.001-06:00

Let's move all the Jews currently living in the Levant to Utah. This will kill two birds with one stone. We will have solved the Palestinian problem once and for all, and once the Israeli Jews settle in Utah, they can begin doing to the Mormons what they are now doing to the Palestinians, and then the Mormons will be too busy bitching about being occupied, their homes bulldozed, being economically besieged and denied humanitarian aid, etc., to ring our doorbells anymore. They also won't be able to campaign against gay "marriage". The Mormon problem will be solved.

Of course, I am flatly opposed gay "marriage" as readers of this weblog should know, but Mormons' supporting the sanctity of
marriage gives me the heebie jeebies.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

2009-01-08T19:28:00.002-06:00

Editor of the right-wing ecumenical journal First Things. Once a Lutheran Pastor, he caused a bit of a stir by converting to Roman Catholicism. In November of 1996, he caused even a greater stir when his journal suggested none too subtly that legalized abortion had so corrupted the American regime as to render it illegitimate in the eyes of the faithful Christian. After 2001, even though abortion remained legal in the American Regime, Fr. Neuhaus thought without any hint of irony that this American Regime, the very legitimacy of which his own journal had relentlessly questioned just five short years ago, had the moral authority and the duty to spread Democracy to the rest of the world and proceeded to cheerlead Bush's bloody global vigilantism. He was baptized a Lutheran, became Catholic, became notorious for endorsing civil disobedience for the sake of resisting the America's "Culture of Death", and then died an obsequious lackey of America's murderous imperialism. I could write more, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.

Stuff that keeps me up at night

2009-01-05T14:59:00.002-06:00

Well, I just heard "asswipe" uttered by a character on a Network Television Show. I heard it distinctly. None of it was bleeped out. This means, of course, that the FCC as the protector of the ears of the virtuous has deemed "asswipe" to be acceptable for the random channel surfer too poor to afford premium cable or at least less offensive than the words one can hear only on channels like HBO such as "shit" and "fuck". I can understand why "fuck" is anathema maranatha. The word makes what should be an act of love into an act of violent hatred. "Fuck", therefore, constitutes nothing less than linguistic rape. If it is possible for a word to be intrinsically offensive, then surely "fuck" is that word. If that word ever becomes socially acceptable, then civil society will no longer be hanging by a mere thread (as it is now), it will be completely gone. So, "asswipe" is not nearly as offensive as "fuck". Fine. Why is it more offensive than "shit"? If truth be told, I'd much rather be a piece of shit than the stuff that has to wipe it up.

A quick note to my readers

2009-01-05T04:51:00.001-06:00

I apologize for not having written much of late. I have been in a bit of a funk. The Blagojevich Scandal has really got me down, actually. I now tell people that I am from Arkansas. I'd rather have people think I slept with my first cousin than suppose I ever voted for the most wicked, corrupt man since, well, the previous Illinois Governor.

Even though my once childlike faith in my Chicago masters has now been brutally popped, I still can look at Washington D.C. for textbook examples of virtue and fortitude. I can truly say, for instance, that I am proud that both parties in our nation's Capitol are full square behind Israel's decision to bomb the shit out of a bunch of poor, starving people in Gaza and then roll over what's left of them with tanks. Surely no one has to be bribed to support that self-evidently noble cause.

The Meaning of Christmas

2008-12-26T00:32:00.001-06:00

Tonight on the ten o'clock news there was a piece about these Protestants in Kansas City going around the area malls dressed as Jesus to remind people of the "reason for the season". Did they dress up in swaddling clothes and hop around in wooden cribs? No, they dressed up in white robes and donned crowns of thorn. That's Good Friday, you idiots!

One guy noted that there is a movement to take 'Christ' out of 'Christmas'. That's the reason for that godless abbreviation 'Xmas'. See what happens when you get rid of Classical Education? The 'X' in 'Xmas' is not the English Letter but the Greek 'chi', which just so happens to be the first letter in the Greek word for Christ, Christos.

Yeah, I know that these people are dismayed at the commercialization of Christmas. Fine, but if they knew their history, which they don't, they would realize that the commercialization of Christmas is just the inevitable result of the Protestant Reformation. The so-called reformers made war on all the religious feast days because they were hindering commerce. The people were going to Mass on those days to worship God and that kept them from buying stuff. Protestants tried to get rid of Christmas, too, but this particular feast proved just too popular. So, the next best thing was to make Christmas into one great big crass Capitalist Cacophony of Consumerism, and that's exactly what happened, of course. And Protestants are dismayed that their project to prostitute Western Christendom has been too successful? There's just no pleasing some people, I guess.

If these Prots in KC were so concerned about preserving the real meaning of Christmas, then they would stop being Prots, become Catholic, and attend Mass. 'Christmas', after all, means Christ's Mass. Moreover, if these Prots stopped being Prots, they would look past the word (Prots tend to be obsessed with the mere word) and contemplate what it actually means. Christmas is the celebration of God's entry into the world as a weak, utterly helpless, completely dependent and defenseless infant. And because He was so helpless, human beings had to take care of Him. His mother and Joseph had to feed Him, clothe Him, and protect Him. It would finally dawn on these Prots after they had digested all this that human deeds cannot be all like filthy rags to God. Did the infant God Incarnate not appreciate it when Mary breast-fed Him, kissed him, kept Him warm in her embrace? If He did not, then He was not truly human, and so much for the Doctrine of the Incarnation, and Christmas might as well be a good excuse to have the kids' eyeballs permanently damaged by video games.

But the Prots don't want to acknowledge this. If they did, they would have to admit that their anthropology is wildly wrong, according to which, man is a piece of shit. He can only sin. Thus, none of his deeds can ever please God. That's why these Prots in KC go around the malls dressed up as the Jesus about to be crucified. They don't just want to remind people that Christmas is about Christ. They also want to show that we crowned Him with thorns, spat on Him, tortured Him, and killed Him because we as human beings are totally and utterly depraved. But Christmas is not about that at all, and thank God for that and thank God that Christ was not raised by Protestants. If Protestantism were right about the inescapable universal depravity of man, then Jesus would have been an abused child, and such a thought would hardly make for a Merry Christmas, eh?

To all my facebook friends

2008-12-21T22:48:00.004-06:00

I write this in the hope that this entry will be threaded through to my profile on facebook. For the last several days I have been unable to do anything on facebook. This because whenever I access facebook, the browser I use crashes on me. The browser I've been using is Firefox, and I have sent scads of notes to the Firefox techies, screaming for help--all to no avail. So, I tried switching back to my old browser, Safari. Facebook crashed that, too. I downloaded Opera tonight, hoping that would help. But, no, facebook crashed Opera faster than either Firefox or Safari ever did. My inability to access facebook is the reason why I failed to wish Lant Fogarty and Brian Stojak happy birthdays. So, Lant and Mr. Stojak, if you are reading this (and I hope you are), I did not forget you. I was not being rude. I just fell victim to a technological SNAFU, the effects of which probably will be permanent. Unless someone can tell me how to remedy this problem, I won't be able to access my facebook account again from my home computer, and that means I won't be on facebook to expose the specious arguments of that Episcopalian Jacobin, the other Mr. Mosley, or distract Professor Brown from his scholarly duties. If anyone wants to contact me or entangle me in an aporetic dialectic, s/he can leave a comment on my weblog, write me at my e-mail address, or, if the need of having some giant evil advertising network mediate internet companionship is just too great, visit my profile at MySpace and "befriend" me there.

It is curious that my problems accessing facebook started a few hours after I noted my disappointment that only shoes had been hurled at our Warmonger-in-Chief. Oh, well. Not being able to access facebook is annoying, but being renditioned to Gitmo would be more so. One must keep his perspective.

What Blagojevich should say

2008-12-13T16:03:00.001-06:00

"I was planning to donate the proceeds from the Senate Sale to Chrysler and GM."

Pecca fortiter!

2008-11-24T18:24:00.004-06:00

(The scene: a well-furnished living room and kitchen in a middle-class suburban house. The kitchen counter is the place where things get dramatic. A well-built man in his mid-forties with a handsomely cleft chin walks in dressed in clerics. He has a very self-satisfied smile on his face. Let's call him Pastor Bob.)

Pastor Bob: Yoo hoo! Anyone home?

(A young female voice answers from somewhere upstairs: "I'll be done in a minute. I'm busy covering my naked underage body with whip cream. Please, help yourself to some milk and cookies on the kitchen counter.")

Pastor Bob: Okey dokey. Will do! (saunters over to counter. He's floating on air, until... Chris Hansen with a very stern look on his face appears behind the Kitchen Counter.)

Hansen: So, what's going on, Father?

Pastor Bob: Excuse me? I am no priest. I am a Lutheran Minister. You can call me Pastor Bob.

Hansen: Well, Pastor Bob, why don't you take a seat right over there. (points to a stool at the Counter)

Pastor Bob: So, you're Chris Hansen, right?

Hansen: Yes, so you've seen this show?

Pastor Bob: Hey, yeah. Big fan. So, I suppose that you're taping "Revenge of To Catch a Predator" right now, eh?

Hansen: You're a big fan? Why then would you try to seduce a thirteen-year-old girl online if you are such a fan of a show that tries to enforce the law against creeps like you.

Pastor Bob: The law? Who needs the law when you have grace? Simul justus et peccator!

Hansen: But you are supposed to be a man of God, sir.  With all due respect, sir, you strike me as shameless, genuinely shameless. You come in here dressed in your clerics to deflower an innocent girl in the most depraved manner conceivable, and not once have you even turned your head down in shame.  No, you actually seem proud.

Pastor Bob: No, not proud. Just honest. Yes, I am a man of God, sir, but I am also a totally depraved sinner. I am, as Luther would say, a ripe piece of shit. Sorry 'bout that word, but you can bleep it out.

Chris Hansen: This just blows my mind. This is beyond comprehension. You are more concerned about a four-letter-word than the fact that you came here with the intent to commit statutory rape? Shouldn't a minister make some effort to set a moral example?

Pastor Bob: What? And give his flock the idea that we can earn our way to heaven. No, sir, that's a most blasphemous Pelaganiasm, and I will have none of that, sir.

Hansen: Then shouldn't a pastor like yourself show that he is one of the elect by acting like one?

Pastor Bob: That's just Calvinist hypocrisy, sir. Look, sir, we all sin, and we all deserve the hottest spot of everlasting hellfire, but--

Hansen: Whoa, wait a minute, here! Are you telling me that all sin is as evil as your attempt to (pages through the transcript)...  You told our decoy this and I quote: "Then after rimming, I can show you how the reverse piledriver is done."  This is sick, twisted, and you are telling me that everyone is perverted as you are? This is just outrageous.

Pastor Bob: Yes, but God's Ways are not our ways, and that outrages man's pride. Every one of our deviations from God's Law is a perversion, sir. You lying to me just now is a perversion.

Hansen: Lying?

Pastor Bob: I was led to believe that I would have an enjoyable evening of really wild, rough sex with a young, svelte teenager. That was obviously a lie.

Hansen: Well, we lied to get sick individuals like you off the streets.

Pastor Bob: And because it's Sweeps Week. Sex sells, ya know, especially scandalous sex with (does air quotes) "men of God". You should be thanking me.

Hansen:   You are free to leave, Pastor Bob.

Pastor Bob: You just don't understand forensic justification.

Hansen: I said you are free to leave, sir!

Pastor Bob: See, we are declared righteous even though--

Hansen: Go, damn you, go!

(Pastor Bob exits, whereupon he is immediately pounced on by three police officers, who arrest him and read him his Miranda rights. As he is hauled off, he is heard yelling, "I may be a perverted piece of shit, but at least I am a snow-covered piece of shit! Sola fide! Sola gratia! Sola scriptura!")

I thought I lost this

2008-11-19T23:27:00.002-06:00

Gee, I thought I had lost this. When I quit MySpace this past January, I joined its mighty rival, thinking it would be less morally repulsive. Well, when the powers that be erased my weblog because I dared to post a denunciation of onanism, I discovered that facebook is fascist, and fascism is, well, very morally repulsive. But I wasn't about to leave facebook, and so my moral purity--if I ever had any, that is--was out the window. So, I figured, not that I had lost all claim to sanctimony, I would rejoin MySpace, which, for all its culture-corroding decadence, at least allows me to inveigh against it, however hypocritically. Anyway, when the jackbooted cyber thugs at facebook voided my entire weblog, I thought I had lost the piece below. Well, it finally turned up in some hitherto forgotten corner of iMac's labrynthian memory, and I post it here just to give Mark Zuckerberg the middle finger. I will post it on my facebook site, as well, and see what happens.

[One of the most ridiculed teachings of the Catholic Church is her condemnation of masturbation as a very grave sin. Most of my friends simply refuse to take it seriously, preferring to guffaw at such exemplary bits of irreverent wit as, "Everytime you masturbate, God kills a kitten." Even many Catholic priests are embarrassed by the teaching. I can tell that most priests really don't like my confessing my sins of onanism. Some have even told me that if masturbation is a sin, it can only be venial. Yeah, telling a Catholic, especially one educated by Jesuits, that a certain sin is venial is de facto an invitation to sin boldly. I admit to my everlasting shame that masturbation is a besetting sin of mine, and it would be very convenient for me to join with the world and just dismiss this particular Church teaching as a bit of laughably exaggerated Puritanism. I cannot. I refuse to think of masturbation as anything less than a very grave sin that can very well send my soul to hell. Yet, I continue to do it. Fine, I am a rank hypocrite, but hypocrites, even though they are damnable wretches, at the very least acknowledge the truth, and the truth is that masturbation kills the soul.

Masturbation tells the soul that the sexual climax is for the sake of selfish gratification and, thus, replaces what is supposed to be the zenith of self-surrendering love with the nadir of a horny fix. Not only that, masturbation tells the soul that this fix is the zenith; the fix becomes the pearl for which the merchant will sell all he has simply to buy. A person who is addicted to onanism will not be a truly loving companion. He will be a disgusting lech who will not see love as a gift to accept but as an opportunity to exploit. Masturbation is the addictive lie that says that love is nothing more than egoism, and such a lie is wicked indeed.

Yes, the act of masturbation is not as evil as, say, murder, torture, etc. As a lie, it is not as wicked as, for instance, lying an entire nation into an unjust war in Iraq. Masturbation is, compared to those other atrocities, a very small thing, of course, but, as Aristotle once wrote, a small error can eventually grow to vast proportions. This is what I attempted to show in my weblog post from May 15, 2006, included below. After having written this post, I thought of this variant of that sniggering witticism above: "Everytime you masturbate, Satan enriches another exploiting pornographer." Masturbation is evil, and I do not want to do it anymore.--PSR]

Last night I saw the British Channel 4 report of the 2004 Darren James AIDS Scare that shut down the porn industry (only temporarily, unfortunately). It is a rather gruesome piece. Richard Sanders uses the Darren James disaster as an opportunity to investigate the more perverse aspects of the porn industry. Of course, all of the porn industry is a perversion and a grievous affront to God and man, but what is called "gonzo porn" is especially twisted. In "gonzo porn" all pretenses of romance and even eroticism give way to outright humiliation, cruelty, and torture. And women consent to this degrading pain because it is an easy way to get lots of money.

Apparently, all this is legal. True, occasionally a gonza producer gets snagged by an obscenity charge (which he in turn proudly and defiantly trumpets as a triumph), but obscenity these days apparently does not include depictions of women getting hammered in the rectum by two phalli. No, in America apparently our precious freedoms, for which the radical Muslims supposedly hate us, extends even to this disgusting vomit.

But that's just my own idiosyncratic aesthetic sensibility, which should not be allowed in any way to influence public law. Fine. Let's shut down the porn industry not because some like me believes it is moral rot that gives American Freedom a very putrid smell. Let's shut down the porn industry because as the Darren James fiasco shows beyond doubt or quibble, it is a clear and present danger to the public health. Darren James gave AIDS to at least three young women, and the extreme promiscuity of the typical porn "actor" can not only very easily (that's obvious) facilitate but also accelerate the spreading of AIDS and other vicious STDs. Surely, every one with a brain will agree that the production of mastubatory aids for dirty old men and fratboys is not worth the risk of spreading fatal diseases.

But, of course, outlawing the porn industry will only drive it underground, where it will be even less subject to monitoring than it now is and, will, hence, be even more dangerous to the Public Health. The porn industry will exist, outlawed or no, because fratboys and middle-aged perverts rule the market, and they don't have brains.

So, porn remains legal. Not only that, it is the expression of one of our freedoms that is now being defended in Iraq. Great. Well, I suppose if the gratified ejaculations of fratboys and middle-aged perverts is worth the spiritual and physical corruption of beautiful young women, then it might as well be worth mayhem and bloodshed as well. Onanism is hardly an innocuous activity. There is a reason why the Catholic Church has always declared it to be a very grave sin.

I must admit that I hate our "freedoms". I hate our "freedoms" because, well, because I have a brain, and I use it. Does this make me a terrorist?

Is Allah of the Koran the God of the Bible?

2008-11-18T05:41:00.003-06:00

Now, many Bible-thumping Protestants would answer this question with a thunderous no, and this is not surprising. Bible-thumping Protestants as a general rule do not have any theology apart from Biblical Revelation, and for most Bible-thumping Protestants (not all, of course) it is simply impossible that someone can know the true God by something other than the Bible.

Unfortunately, some Catholics agree with their separated Bible-thumping brethren on this matter. This is unfortunate because to say that Muslims worship a god different from the True God directly contradicts official Catholic teaching as articulated clearly in §841 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The Church's relationship with the Muslims. "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day."

Now, this paragraph is controversial for reasons other than its declaration that the Muslims adore the True God. Not a few Protestants will say that this paragraph asserts that Muslims are saved as Muslims. It is not the purpose of this brief essay to explain why this is untrue. Suffice it to say that inclusion in the plan of salvation does not mean salvation. The plan of salvation included Judas, but I don't think anyone (except for the apocastasists) would say he was saved.

It is the purpose of this essay to show why §841 is right to say that the Muslims acknowledge the True God. But before I show this, I must put up a few proleptic disclaimers. I am not saying that Islam is a true religion. It is not. It started out as a Christological heresy, and a Christological heresy it remains. I am not saying that the Koran is not hostile to the Christian faith. It is. I am not saying that Christians should not try to convert Muslims to the truth of the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God and the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. No, Christians should do everything we can to evangelize Muslims because Islam's denial of the true nature of Jesus of Nazareth is a lie, and lies are evil and must be done away with. Nevertheless, just because Islam promotes a most pernicious lie about our Lord and Saviour does not mean that everything about Islam is a lie.

Many who claim that Islam worships a different god make the following argument: Islam denies the Trinity. We know that the True God is the Trinity. Islam's god is not a trinity and, hence, cannot be the True God.

The Biblical Warrant that the proponents of this argument use is 1 John 2:23: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father." The Koran clearly, unequivocally, and repeatedly says that Allah has no son, and if that is not an outright denial of the son, what else could be? Ergo, if 1 John 2:23 means anything at all, it must mean that Islam hath not the Father, and since John 17:3 tells us that the Father is the only true God, there is no other conclusion to be had but that the sonless Allah cannot be the true God, must indeed be a false god.

Now, the argument, as forcefully tidy as it seems to be, has a big problem, that being Romans 10:1-4:

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.

Paul here is talking about the Jews who have rejected Christ and, hence, the Son. Yet, Paul assures us that these Jews have a zeal for God, the true God. Now, this contradicts the above interpretation of 1 John 2:23. Ergo, one interpretation must go, since we know that scripture does not contradict scripture. St. Paul is abundantly clear: The Jews, despite their rejection of Christ, still acknowledge the true God. Therefore, 1 John 2:23 cannot mean that rejection of the Son is rejection of the true God. We must look for another interpretation, one that comports with Romans 10:1-4, and the key to this harmonious interpretion is, I would suggest. John 14:6:

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Rejection of the Son means only the inability to reach the Father, but that does not imply a denial that God is God. One need not be able to reach any given object to acknowledge its reality. I know that the moon which orbits around our earth is the true moon, but there is no way I can get there without becoming an astronaut, but, alas, in my youth I foolishly rejected astronaut studies. In fact, I denied them. And you know what they say, "Whosoever denieth astronaut studies, the same hath not the moon." So, I have not the moon, but I still acknowledge the true moon.

The tragedy of the Jews is that they know the true God and love Him but have denied the only means possible to reach the object of all their hopes, yearnings, and love. This is the true and profoundly sad meaning of 1 John 2:23, and it applies just as poignantly to the Muslims.

The argument that the denial of the trinity involves the denial of the true God, therefore, confuses theology with soteriology. The denial of the son blocks the path of salvation. It does not change one's knowledge into fiction. That would be absurd. St. Paul says in Romans 1:19-20 that true knowledge of God can be had through natural reason alone. It is clear that this knowledge cannot include knowledge that God is triune for that cannot be known through the unaided intellect. The Trinity can only be known through Biblical Revelation.

Those who deny that Allah is the true God may concede that natural knowledge of God is possible but hasten to add that this knowledge remains true so long as there is an excusable ignorance of divine revelation. Once one is told about the trinity, then he has no excuse. If he denies the trinity after being told the truth, then he is denying the true nature of the True God and is, therefore, denying God. But, again, this implies that the natural knowledge of God was really never true knowledge because it can be falsified by rejecting additional knowledge. This is like saying that a student's knowledge of arithmetic never really was true because he dismisses Number Theory as poppycock. Once you know something, you know it regardless of your eagerness or refusal to learn more. The Unknown God of the Athenians remains the True God of Creation, regardless whether or no the denizens of Athens went on to accept the trinity.

Islam, for all its evil heresies (and they are evil), acknowledges the God of creation. What other God can that be except the One True God whom Christians worship (and Catholics eat)? If we say that Allah is a false God, then we say that the knowledge of God that Paul says nature gives us is false knowledge, and this implies, of course, that God's creation cannot be the source of real truth. Creation becomes an illusion, and the Christian faith becomes nothing other than a gnostic sect in which the only true knowers are those who understand the Bible according to their own idiosyncratic interpretations. Surely the God of the universe is more universal than this.

A Letter to University City's Finest

2008-11-15T21:02:00.000-06:00

[More than four years later I am still waiting for a response.--PSR]

June 21, 2004

To the Police Department of University City, Missouri:

Is it ever right to disobey the law? One of your officers Saturday morning (June 19, 2004) told me, "Never." Thereupon, I asked her whether or not the few Germans who defied the Law of Nazi Germany and sheltered Jews were right to do so. To my astonishment she said that she would never say it is right to disobey any law and proceeded to call re-inforcements. Are you that threatened by pointed questions? And why is it so damn hard for you to acknowledge that it is right to disobey the law when the law is evil as it most certainly was in Germany during the Nazi Regime? Anyway, when her re-inforcement came, I asked him the same question. He gave the same answer, whereupon I asked him if slaves were right to run away and thereby defy the law of the Southern States before the Civil War. He said that was in the past and that he was talking about right now and the future. But there are two problems with that clarification: 1) it shows an ignorance of my question for I asked, "is it EVER right to disobey the law," and, hence, the question does not have any time limits, and 2) the officer in his clarification ignores completely the question of evil laws, presumably thinking that this problem is forever in the past.

Apparently, the female officer, who is black, heard my example of slaves' disobeying the law by running away from their masters. That got her very angry. She told me that I was insane for asking these "racial questions" and threatened to send me to Metro Psych. When I tried to tell her that my questions had to do with the postive law and justice and not with race, she simply threatened me with mace and told me to leave U. City or else I would be hauled off to Metro Psych. So, I continued walking down Delmar which I was doing anyway.

This just confirmed for me that you officers are nothing but stupid thugs. And anyone who can't admit that people who defied German Law to protect fellow human beings or slaves who defied American Law by escaping unmerited and cruel bondage were absolutely right to do so has clearly made the Law of Men into some kind of a god. It is frightening that you cops actually think like this. Very frightening. Are you surprised that you are often called fascists? You certainly think like them.

C. I. Scofield and the New Law

2008-11-10T14:59:00.001-06:00

C. I. Scofield is the guy most responsible for the spread of the Rapture Heresy in this country. In 1909 Scofield came out with his reference Bible, which was the Left Behind phenomenon of that time. So many fundamentalists and evangelicals used that Bible so often that they forgot when the Bible stopped and Scofield's notes began. I still cannot understand and probably never will understand why Protestants need to have Bible with study notes, anyway. Do not Protestants believe that scripture interprets itself? If that is the case, then the Bible already has its own study notes, and Protestants do not need the notes supplied by an R.C. Sproul or a Hank Hanegraff. They certainly could have done without the notes of C.I. Scofield, which started Protestants believing that Ezechiel prophesied Cold War Geopolitics of the late Twentieth Century and have really fucked up our Policy towards the Middle East. As readers of this weblog know, I am opposed to both abortion and contraception. Therefore, I can only wish that Scofield's parents had contracted a Josephite Marriage. Below is an old essay I wrote on just one of Scofield's very perverse notes:

C. I. Scofield has this note to the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:

"Having announced the kingdom of heaven as "at hand," the King, in Mt. v.-vii., declares the principles of the kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount has a twofold application: (1) Literally to the kingdom. In this sense it gives the divine constitution for the righteous government of the earth. Whenever the kingdom of heaven is established on earth it will be according to that constitution which may be regarded as an explanation of the word "righteousness" as used by the prophets in describing the kingdom (e.g. Isa. xi. 4,5;xxxii.1; Dan. ix. 4). In this sense the Sermon on the Mount is pure law, and transfers the offence from the overt act to the motive (Mt. v.21,22,27,28). Here lies the deeper reason why the Jews rejected the kingdom. They had reduced "righteousness" to mere ceremonialism, and the Old Testament idea of the kingdom to a mere affair of outward splendour and power. They were never rebuked for expecting a visible and powerful kingdom, but the words of the prophets should have prepared them to expect also that only the poor in spirit and the meek could share in it (e.g. Isa xi. 4). The seventy-second Psalm, which was universally received by them as a description of the kingdom, was full of this. For these reasons the Sermon on the Mount in its primary implication gives neither the privilege nor the duty of the Church [emphasis mine]. These are found in the Epistles. Under the law of the kingdom, for example, no one may hope for forgiveness who has not first forgiven (Mt vi. 12, 14, 15). Under grace the Christian is exhorted to forgive because he is already forgiven (Eph. iv. 30-32). [The King James Study Bible, Reference Edition Edited by C. I. Scofield, pp. 999-1000]"

The dispensationalist version of the Gospel goes like this. Christ came to offer the Earthly Kingdom of a Millennial Reign to the Jews, but the Jews rejected Him. So, Christ turned to the Gentiles and inaugurated what dispensationalists call the "Church Age". That's the age we are in now. It is not the Kingdom. The Kingdom for dispensationalists can be ONLY the Millennial Reign by Christ on earth. No, the "Church Age" is actually a parenthesis in prophetic history, and it will end when Christ secretly raptures the Church (understood, of course, in the Protestant sense as the assembly of all believers--only those who believe in salvation sola fide, obviously). After the rapture prophetic history starts again, we have the final tribulation, Armageddon, and, then, finally, the Millennial Reign.

So, the whole Christian Faith thing was really only Christ's Plan B, an afterthought, actually. No, the big plan was and remains the Millennial Kingdom. Therefore, Christ's longest and most detailed sermon cannot be understood as being intended for Christians. No, it has to be Christ's detailed instructions for the Final Jewish Kingdom.

Scofield's actual argument for this is very revealing. He basically argues that this sermon cannot be binding on Christians because it has the character of pure law. All good Christians have known since Luther that the Gospel has freed Christians from the law.

But then what the deuce do you do with Christ's announcement of the New Law in the Sermon of the Mount? Well, Luther's answer was just to focus on Paul, or, rather, on his interpretation of Paul. That worked somewhat, but it was kinda hard to ignore the Sermon on the Mount. Well, it was also kinda hard to ignore Christ's vision of the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46) in which the lambs go to heaven because of what they did and the goats go to hell because of what they failed to do. Clearly, Christ's own words clearly meant that the law and good works were still very important, despite what Luther thought Paul said.

The dispensationalist system enters the scene and finally makes the New Testament safe for Lutheran Soteriology. Yes, Christ thought the law was very, very important, but when he was talking about the law, he was specifically talking about His Thousand Year Reign on earth which the Jews rejected. Because the Jews rejected the Kingdom, we're still in the Church Age until the Rapture, and, therefore, the Beatitudes, though really beautiful suggestions, are not binding on us.

The same applies to Matthew 25:31-46. Christ was here referring to those gentiles who will give aid to the righteous Jews during the final tribulation and after the rapture, i.e. after the "Church Age". Therefore, it is not binding for today's Christian. To be sure, the Christian may receive it as a beautiful suggestion but, nevertheless, can rest assured that his failure to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and comfort the afflicted won't jeopardize his salvation. In the "Church Age" Lutheran Soteriology applies: he is saved by faith and by faith alone.

In sum, the dispensationalist scheme by placing the application of key New Testament passages beyond the Protestant Age renders them harmless to Protestant Theology. Clever, ain't it? If Christ contradicts the doctrine of sola fide just say he was not talking to us but to Jews. The only price you have to pay is a foreign policy that actually encourages tribulation-triggering instability in the Middle East. For when it is clear that the world will go down into a final conflagration of war, mass famine, disease, etc., Christ will have no choice but to rapture His church and restart the prophetic clock.

Well, there is also this small snag. Scofield tells us that the blueprint for the "Church" is found in the Epistles. Well, these include, of course, the Epistle of James. Whereas the Protestants can pretty well read almost every other epistle with Lutheran specs, James has always caused them to avert their eyes completely. The bright light that James sheds on the continued importance of the law and good works is too glaring for even the darkest of Protestant shades. One would think that Scofield or some other dispensationalist would transfer the entire epistle to the post-trib age, but neither Scofield nor any other dispensationalist I know of does this. I guess that means that even in the "Church Age" "a man is justified by works and not by faith alone." Damn. The Dispensationalist doesn't completely get rid of Catholic Soteriology, and yet we still have to endure an utterly insane Middle East policy. What a gip, man!

Nietzsche, Morality, and Eternity

2008-11-09T14:53:00.004-06:00

[I re-post this for the benefit of certain nihilists with whom I have been corresponding of late.--PSR]

The following essay is addressed to a woman and was in response to one of her posts on her weblog. The post was about Nietzsche's theory of morality. The woman claimed that Nietzsche asserted that all morality is a result of group think. I refuted this claim and wrote other things as well. It may be of some interest to my readers, or not.

Okay, zur Sache, as the Krauts say. First off, it is wrong to claim that Nietzsche proposed that morality is always the product of group think, if by "group" you mean the unwashed, knuckle-scraping masses of the "herd". For Nietzsche there are two categories of morality, the one of "good and bad" and the other of "good and evil". The former is the morality of the strong and is by Nietzsche's lights the healthy, life-affirming morality. The latter is the morality of the weak, which is according to Nietzsche based not upon love, as its proponents claim, but upon vindictive resentment against the strong. This is what Nietzsche calls "slave morality" and that is what would be according to him the morality of the "herd" and not the former morality of the aristocratic lords or simply the strong.

Now, it is crucial to understand that Nietzsche's critique of morality is not a critique of morality as such. In fact, he regards morality or values as indispensable for any thriving culture. A culture that has no values will fall victim to decadence and nihilism. Nihilism is the idea that nothing in life is of value. If nothing in life is of value, then suicide is the only reasonable answer. What is true on an individual level is also true on the cultural: A culture that falls victim to nihilism will have no reason to sustain itself and will die out. Nietzsche's entire project was to come up with a new set of values that would counter the nihilism he saw threatening to snuff out his beloved European culture.

Nietzsche argued vehemently that the Christian faith was directly responsible for this grave nihilistic threat. To understand why he thought so, we must understand his analysis of slave morality. Slave morality is a reaction of the weak against the strong. The weak are weak precisely because they can't retaliate against the strong when the strong rape and pillage them. So, the weak literally make a virtue out of their pathetic lot and declare that they don't strike back not because they can't but because they are the ones who are truly good and moral, and the raping and pillaging aristocratic lords are not just bad; they are evil.

But the strong will get their comeuppance. Just not in this life. In the next life, and in that life they will be consigned to the lowest depth of sulphurous hell, and the weak will see this gruesome spectacle and rejoice because the revenge which they could not accomplish in this life will be achieved spectacularly in the next. Thus, Nietszche regards all the Christian claims about love to be bogus. All Christian morality is predicated upon a final eschatological payback for the noble blond beast. This is a morality not of love but revenge.

But these Christian values did produce a thriving culture for even though it was at bottom a religion of resentment against the powerful, it at the very least had a conception of a mighty jealous God that gave the Christian Age a purpose and a sense of meaning. But the Christian Faith had within itself the seeds of its own destruction: its insistence that liberation comes through truth, which, of course, meant that Christians had a moral obligation to uncover the truth. This obligation to the truth produced modern science, and modern science in turn showed the truth to be this: that the Christian Faith is a silly myth and that there is no God. God is dead.

But even though modern science had unmasked the Christian Faith as just another hollow ideology, Christian values still formed the basis of the modern West, and this is where the nihilistic crisis kicks in. Society in the modern west is based upon values which are in turned based upon something that modern science has shown to be simply nothing. Hence, the modern west values nothing. The only thing to do is to scrap the Christian Faith entirely and start afresh with a new set of values, one that will place the ultimate value on life in this world instead of life in some non-existent next. This is the project that Nietzsche terms Die Umwertung aller Werte, the transvaluation of all values.

Okay, fine, but this transvaluation cannot be effected simply by an attack on the Christian Faith. It cannot even be effected by replacing the Christian Faith with some new philosophy of life. What must be done first and foremost is a radical uprooting of everything Christian, but this is much harder than at first impression. One cannot just merely get rid of the creed, the Bible, various pious devotions etc., one must go to the heart of the matter, and for Nietzsche the heart of the matter is actually not so much the Christian faith but the very idea that this world can be understood only by another world in the beyond, and this could be the Christian Heaven or the Platonic Realm of Forms. As long as this world is understood as a mere anticipation of or an imperfect participation in some eternal otherworldly realm, then this world is subordinate to nothingness and is, hence, robbed of its value. Nietzsche's war on the Christian Faith is ultimately a war against the Platonic tradition of metaphysics. Not only that, his war is against the very notion of understanding our world in the light of eternity.

Philosophers throughout the centuries have taken recourse to some notion of eternity because without it it is impossible to formulate general truths. If something is true, then it must be true always and everywhere. But if we look around ourselves, there is nothing that is eternal. Everything we experience with our five senses is particular and is subject to change, decay, and death, and yet our minds still formulate general truth claims about the world. If the Nietzschean project will work at all, it must rid us of this nasty ingrained habit of implicitly comparing this world of change to some unreal world of eternity. As long as we have this comparison, however implicit, we devalue the world in which we live and will hence fall victim to nihilism. To really affirm the only life we have, we must, therefore, radically alter our thought. We can no longer think about eternal Being in whatever form but about ever-changing Becoming. Only such a radical transformation of thinking will rid the world of this nihilistic claptrap about eternal Being and yield a truly life-affirming philosophy of Becoming.

But Nietzsche himself could not dispense with eternity. Simply because he had to make general formulations of truth himself. To rid the mind of all concepts of eternity is to rob the mind of coherence and, therewith, the ability to affirm anything at all, much less the glorious rapings and pillaging of the noble Blond Beast. Nietzsche could have suggested that we all get lobotomies so that we can forget we are intelligent human beings and act like noble brutes, but he did not. He prized knowledge and philosophy too much to castrate himself intellectually. So, he came up with another solution: if eternity cannot be rid of, then let's rob it from the gods and bring it down to earth. Let's make eternity part of our very lives. And presto! We have the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same!

This doctrine teaches that you must will everything that happens in your life to recur in exactly the same manner throughout all of eternity. By doing so, you are using eternity no longer to judge the world as inferior and thereby to condemn it but to affirm and celebrate it. Pretty neat solution, actually. Nietzsche could not rid man of his need for eternity and so he subordinates it to the service of affirming this life and in doing so finally gets his revenge on Plato. Whereas Plato enslaved this world to eternity, Nietzsche has put eternity under the yoke of man's life-affirming will. Or has he?

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same robs man of the ability to say no. He must affirm everything in his life even atrocities such as murder, rape, preventive war, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and the like. So what, Nietzche might respond, this life is all there is und Nichts außerdem!. If you are going to truly value it, you cannot make comparisons between it and a world that does not exist. The only standard of life is this life, and you might as well say yes to it eternally because that is the only thing that will satisfy this ineradicable eternity craving man has.

Fine, but this ineradicable craving for eternity is in man precisely because he is unable to will the eternal recurrence of the same for everything. If he actually had the ability to make eternity bend to his will, then he certainly would not will an eternity of each and every happening of his earthly life. Even the Blond Beast would want at least an eternity of his best pillagings and not those in which the other lords caught him, tied him to a tree, covered him with honey, and then let big ants loose on him. Man wants, if not the good, then at least the pleasant, and that is why he will always say no to the being covered with honey and ants. No man is able psychologically to say yes everything in his life because not everything in his life is pleasant. If we could discipline ourselves to say an eternal yes to everything that happens to us, then we would lose entirely are motivation to seek the pleasurable and avoid the pain. This is hardly an affirmation of life. This is a numbing of ourselves to the point where we would be as insensitive and as dumb and as inhuman as rocks.

But there is an even more fundamental objection to this teaching. Man simply cannot will eternity, and any one who acts like he does is considered insane (including Nietzsche--cf. his notorious "I'd rather be a Basel Professor than God" letter to Burckhardt). Nietzsche merely shows with this stupid idea that not only can he not dispense with eternity, he also cannot dispense with the power of God for obviously God is the only being powerful enough to will anything for all of eternity. Just as Kant killed off God in his first critique only to need Him to make his moral theory work, Nietzsche kills off God to rescue us from otherworldly nihilism only to need His power to make sense of an atheistic chaos. Nietzsche's whole project merely serves to confirm Dostoevski's famous dictum: "If there is no God, I am God." Of course, such a statement is absurd, and that's the point. Without God we are doomed to absurdity, and no amount of wanna-be superhuman will can extricate us from it.

Now in answer to your question put to your readers, I say that Nietzsche has not shown that our morality is simply a result of self-interest and the evolutionary urge to survive. Nietzsche himself says that one morality, the morality that he attacks as a slave morality, the morality that has prevailed in the west for the last two millennia, is not merely the result of self-interest and a Darwinian struggle for life. No, it is also the result of an intelligent being's inability to think without a notion of eternity. Brute animals don't need eternity to eat, sleep, copulate, and excrete, but man does more than brute animals. He reasons, and as long as he reasons, eternity will haunt him and force him to wonder why. Nietzsche tried his best to destroy this wonder. He failed, and this wonder prevails, and we continue to wonder why we think about eternity and from whence these thoughts come. Our temporal science cannot exhaust such questions for that would be as absurd as a stream draining an ocean. Modern science can only explain itself in the light of eternity and not vice versa. The wonder will never be extinguished, and this means that faith will never be as well.

Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick or why I am considered a homophobe

2008-11-09T00:17:00.007-06:00

More than a decade ago, in the spring of 1996, I had a very bit part in a production of Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey at the Metcalf Student Experimental Theatre on the vast SIU-E campus. Jeffrey is a rather irreverent (and actually very witty) play about one gay man's dating problems during the late 'Eighties when the AIDS epidemic hit the New York City gay scene especially hard. It is by Catholic standards morally offensive, and my bit part was hardly innocent. I played the protagonist's father, and in a dream sequence I try with my wife to get our son to engage us in phone sex. Actually, my delivery was pretty good. I got a lot of big laughs, but that just made my sin all the blacker. I did eventually confess my participation in this play as a sin and have vowed never to be in such a morally compromising play again, however overpowering my lust for the stage may be. I like any actor love the stage and have been willing to do almost anything (okay, fine, that "almost" is disingenuous) to show off on stage. Actors are whores.

Because I had such a small role, during hell week and the nights of the performance, I spent most of my time in the green room with the other bit parts and cameos. I forgot how precisely I whiled away the time there. I didn't get along with the rest of the cast that well. They thought me a rather stiff snob, and they gave me every reason to want to be a stiff snob. For instance, they all poo-pooed William Shakespeare, one of them going so far as to say that people say they like Shakespeare merely to be thought educated. There is no way that anyone can like Shakespeare. Well, there is no way that an SIU-E rube can appreciate Shakespeare, I very much wanted to say but did not. I kept it to myself and tried to console myself with happy memories of Derek Jacobi's Hamlet.

But I did have a revelation while working on this production. One particular line near the end of the play puzzled me. One of the final scenes in the play takes place in Central Park during the Gay Pride Parade. The scene opens with an epitome of an Italian Mama somewhat imperiously trying to find her way in all the confusing dinof the festivities. She is very loud and garrulous and, as all mothers are, effusive in her pride for her son.

In what is supposed to be half a laughline and half a statement ofthe play's true agendum, she boldly asserts, "I'm so proud of my preoperative transsexual lesbian son!" A preoperative transsexual lesbian is a man about to undergo a sex change so that he (she--whatever) can live a life of a lesbian.

A short time later in that same scene the son tells a television reporter that he and his group are "going to ride on a flatbed truck, for all the world to see!" to which the Mother adds this puzzling explanation: "Because we are proud of who and what we are!" So, I asked the actress who played the Italian Mama what I thought to be the obvious question: "How the deuce can you be proud of what you are when you are about to undergo very serious surgery for the sake of changing what you are?" This mother's son obviously was not proud of what he was. Otherwise, he would not be about to avail himself of modern surgery to escape his male body.

The actress made dagger eyes at me. She did make a response, and I am sorry to report that I have since forgotten what she said, but if my memory serves, she made it clear to me that she found the very question offensive. I remember shortly thereafter recounting this exchange to a good friend of mine who has allowed me to describe her to others as "bisexual witch". She told me that she would find the question offensive as well. By the way, this same woman would jealously defend the academic freedom of Princeton's Peter Singer to say that a pig has more worth than a newborn infant, but it's impolite to dare challenge GLBT propaganda. Go figure. (I put this slap at my good friend in here on the off chance that she will read this. I still consider her a very dear friend, but on this she needs to be called out on the carpet).

The reason why my question would offend those who think everything with the GLBT world is kosher is that it assumes that nature is a component of our whatness. The proponents of the GLBT world like other liberals want freedom from nature. If you want to defy nature by having sterile sex deliberately for gratification, go right ahead, that is your right because we have been liberated from the prison of nature. If you feel like you are a woman even though you have a membrum viri, then by all means cut it off because nature is just an accidental accesory. Nature has no part in determining what you are. Modern gnosis now gives you the power to determine what you are in the confines of your own mind. You become your own Demiurge.

This then was my revelation. The GLBT movement is premised upon a gnostic hostility to nature. The reaction that I received from my question was all I needed to recognize yet another form of the dreary old gnostic hatred of God's creation.

Cherche la femme!

2008-11-04T12:52:00.002-06:00

Recently, as some of my readers may know, a young woman chastised me for voting at all. Voting, she said, simply legitimated an absurdity we pretend to call a meaningful democracy. Well, I fell in love instantaneously (she looks really good in a bikini as well as being politically astute) and swore that I would be true to my new one and only true love by doing what the Sunni zealots in Iraq did and abstain from the polls. Well, my sense of civic duty got the better of me. You can take the boy out of civics class, but, apparently, you can't take the civics class out of the boy. Grade school indoctrination is indelible like a tattoo. So, I voted and now my only true love will spurn me as yet another gullible fool of the Military Industrial Wall Street Complex. Woe is me!

And my fellow archconservative Catholics will scream at me because I voted for an infanticidal maniac. No, I did not vote for Mr. Obama. He's actually not an infanticidal maniac. That's just his secular decadent infidel cover according to the principle of Taqiyya. He's really a filthy Arab, hellbent upon subjugating this good Christian nation to the horrors of dhimmitude, but to do so he must first impose Sharia Law, which will not just kick abortion back to the states but will outlaw it outright, and this is what all good Christians are obligated to desire. So, good Christians who really think Obama is a closet radical Muslim must vote for him.

No, I voted for Cynthia McKinney. Only because another very beautiful young woman likes her. Okay, well, Noam Chomsky did vote for her as well, and I can't deny his influence, of course. But I did what I did primarily to score some brownie points with this very alluring female. Look, the presidential election in Illinois was called as soon as Obama announced his candidacy way back in 2007. Calvinist pre-destination may not apply to salvation, but it sure does to the Illinois electoral votes. So, I made a cynical calculation: if my vote does not matter in the big scheme of things, then I might as well use my vote to impress some chic, eh?

Of course, if McKinney had even a snowball's chance in hell of winning, I would not have voted for her. Simply because she is an infanticidal maniac like Mr. Obama. But both of the viable candidates are sick demented fucks who advocate outright murder. McCain gets his jollies singing paeans to preventive war, a neo-con euphemism for cold-blooded murder and Obama thinks its fine and dandy to let born babies completely outside the womb die. If I have to vote for a monster, then, well, the least I can do is vote for one who simply cannot win.

Of course, the woman whose bewitching blandishments beckoned me to cast my vote for this infanticidal maniac and thereby cast my soul into hell wants McKinney to win. Her vote is quixotic, mine is cynical, and she will read this, be offended by my cynicism, and I will not even gain that one thing that I hoped my vote would get. No, my vote will get me nothing but scorn, outrage, and, if I don't confess it soon, everlasting fire and brimstone; trying to impress a woman, however alluring she may be, is unfortunately not a valid proportional reason for voting for an infanticidal maniac. So, my vote was simply an absurd naught. But, then again, so is the notion of American Democracy.

491 years ago today

2008-10-31T19:34:00.000-05:00

[From the First Book of Heinrich Heine's Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, translated by me]

But even more than the Devil's mind Martin Luther mistook the mind of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Because of my strict impartiality, I must now take up the cudgel for both, as I did for the devil, against the all too eager man.

Indeed, if one were to ask me in conscience, I would have to admit that the Pope, Leo X, was actually far more reasonable than Luther, and that the latter simply did not grasp the ultimate raison d'etre of the Catholic Church. For Luther did not understand that the idea of Christianity, the annihilation of sensuality, contradicts human nature so much that it could never be carried out in its entirety. He had not understood that Catholicism was like, as it were, a Concordat between God and the Devil, i.e. between Spiritualism and Materialism, in which the primacy of spiritualism was acknowledged in theory, but materialism was given a status in which it could in praxis exercise all its annuled rights. Whence came a clever system of concessions, which the Church concocted to the benefit of sensuality, but always in ways that denounced every act of sensuality and preserved the disdainful usurpation of spiritualism.

You may give a hearing to the delicate inclinations of your heart and embrace a beautiful girl, but you must confess that it was a scandalous sin, and for this sin you must do penance. That this penance could be effected by money was as beneficial for humanity as it was useful for the Church. The Church permitted the payment of, so to speak, resistance money for every fleshly pleasure, and soon there developed a tax for all sorts of sins. There were even holy peddlers, who, in the name of the Roman Church, hawked a letter of indulgence for any of the taxed sins.

One such peddler was that Tetzel against whom Luther first rose. Our historians are of the opinion that this protest against the indulgence trade was an insignificant event, and that it was only Roman pigheadedness that drove Luther, who at the outset railed only against an abuse of the Church, to attack the entire ecclesiastical authority at her highest pinnacle. But this is simply erroneous. The indulgence trade was no abuse, it was a consequence of the entire Church system. As Luther attacked the former, he attacked the Church Herself, and She had to condemn him as a heretic.

Leo X, the refined Florentine, the student of Poliziano, the friend of Raphael, the Greek philosopher with the threefold crown, which the conclave bestowed upon him perhaps because he suffered from an illness that in no way comes from Christian abstinence and was back then still very dangerous.... Leo von Medici, how he must have smiled at this poor, chaste simpleton of a monk, who believed the Gospel was the charter of Christianity, and this charter must be the Truth! Leo probably did not even notice what Luther wanted. He was at the time much too busy with the construction of St. Peter's Basilica, the cost of which was financed with the indulgence money, so that the sins did actually and truly give the money that built this church.

Hence, the Basilica became a monument, as it were, to sensual lust, as did those pyramids that were built by an Egyptian prostitute with money she earned from her trade. Perhaps one could better make the claim for this house of God than for the Cathedral at Cologne that it was built by the devil. This triumph of Spiritualism, namely that Materialism itself must build for its enemy its most beautiful temple, that for the heap of concessions one makes with the flesh one acquires the means to glorify the Spirit, this is not understood in the German North.

For here, far more than under the burning Italian Sky, it was possible to practice a Christianity which made the least concessions possible to sensuality. We Northerners have< a colder blood, and we require not so many letters of indulgence for fleshly sins as our paternally concerned Leo had sent us. The climate makes it easier for us to practice the Christian virtues, and on October 31, 1517, as Luther nailed his theses against indulgences on the doors of the Augustine Church, the town moat of Wittenburg had probably already frozen over. One could go ice-skating, which is a cold amusement and, therefore, not a sin.

I have to vote for Barack Obama

2008-10-24T13:56:00.003-05:00

Obama claims he is a Christian and an American. Well, that's a lie. He is a Muslim, and a very radical one, too, the very kind that provoked Bush into the Global War on Terror. After all, Obama's middle-name is Hussein, which we all know is Arabic for, "I will impose Sharia Law once elected." So, this means that if Obama is elected president, women will be forced to wear birkas, the federal age of consent will go down to at least 13, adulterers and practicing homosexuals will be publicly stoned, Osama bin Laden will be appointed Secretary of Jihad, and our foreign policy will be aimed at the establishment of a global Caliphate. And so, we will withdraw our troops from Iraq and use them to invade and conquer those Infidels in Europe, Russia, and, of course, Israel.

Unfortunately, this means that as a devout Catholic, I must vote for him. Because he will impose Sharia Law, that means abortion in this country will be outlawed. And for a devout Catholic like me, abortion is pretty much the only issue that I am allowed to consider when casting my vote. Yes, Obama will wage holy wars on behalf of radical Islam. So, what? War is not intrinsically evil. It is, as Bishops like Burke and Meyers and neo-con Catholics like Weigel have reminded us, purely a matter of prudence for state leaders to decide. Hoi polloi like you and me are not in a position to judge all the complicated factors that go into the decision to bomb the shit out of another country. Besides reasonable people can disagree over the justice of going to war for oil and Haliburton's stock portfolio. So, if reasonable people can disagree over that, it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree over the merits of global Jihad. But reasonable people can't disagree over abortion at all. If you think it is right to legalize baby murder, then you are insane, of course, unless, that is, you are explaining away the bombing of hospitals as usual wartime collateral damage. Therefore, I have to vote for Obama and his imposition of Sharia Law.

But, I can hear people saying to me, "You're being very silly. Even if Obama is anti-abortion, and that is hard to believe, given his full-throated endorsement of Roe and outright infanticide, McCain is explicitly anti-abortion and he won't impose Sharia Law." Well, yes, McCain says he is anti-abortion and all, but all he'll do if elected is, perhaps, appoint judges to the bench who might vote to overturn Roe--if, that is, a state challenges it--, and even then abortion will not be outlawed. It will then be a choice for the states. Obama, radical Muslim that he certainly is, will not be satisfied to leave such a pressing issue to a maze of contingencies. Once in office he will have the infidels on the Court beheaded and use the Army to impose Sharia Law in every single state. He will be able to justify this extraordinary use of executive power by invoking Dick Cheney's groundbreaking interpretation of the Constitution. Abortion will be outlawed in a matter of days. So, if Obama truly is the closet radical Muslim that everyone thinks he is, then he is the true anti-abortion candidate, and McCain is really a pro-choice weenie. Therefore, Catholics must, if they are to avoid the pains of perpetual perdition, vote for Obama.

And, yes, Obama has styled himself to be an infanticidal whacko. But he's still in the closet, remember? He won't come out until his Inauguration, i.e. after he has had his transition team replace Blackwater mercs with ones from Al Qaeda. Until then he has to be an extremist on abortion to get the godless feminists on his side. That's part of his cover. Obama thought that if he pandered to all those secular femanazis, no one would ever mistake him for one of UBL's henchmen.

Well, he was wrong. I see through you, Mr. Obama, and so have many other people. I am terrified of a global jihad. I don't like women in birkas. And although I think adultery and sodomy are sins, punishing those sins by public stonings strikes me as way harsh. But, as we've seen, war is merely a prudential matter. Sartorial concerns are trivial, of course, and adulterers and practicing homosexuals are in fact vile sinners. Unborn babies are innocent, and the Muslim Barack Obama wants to protect them. Radical Islam has its defects, true, but on the one issue that my Church allows me to consider when I cast my vote, Radical Islam gets it right. Therefore, if I do not want to go to hell, if my Catholic Conscience will ever let me sleep at night, I have no choice but to vote for Barack Obama.

I must say, though, I kinda like the prospect of lowering the age of consent. But, of course, I mayn't let my perversions enter into my political calculations, either.

an aphorism

2008-10-21T20:39:00.000-05:00

The skeptic always ends up justifying the status quo simply because he says he cannot know anything else. Thus, the skeptic is the paradigmatic conservative.

W. und Selbstbefriedigung

2008-10-17T23:59:00.003-05:00

Picking out the glaring idiocies in Bush's speeches is very easy. When he pounded the podium and defiantly announced that we would not let foreigners interfere with the internal affairs of Iraq, for instance. It's simple, but it is also as pointless as masturbation. The satisfaction vanishes as quickly at it, er, came, and then you feel as empty as before. That was, by the way, exactly how I felt after watching Oliver Stone's W., a film that told me what I already knew, namely that Our Dear Leader is a subliterate fratboy, whose grunting, banal cluelessness would insult the intellect of a Neanderthal. The film will spark no revolt, no armed rebellion, only, perhaps, a self-indulgent chuckle and a fleeting sense of superiority, which will vanish upon the sobering recognition that feeling superior to such a stupid stump is hardly meritorious and, worse, that we the American people elected such a vacuous fuckwit. One can buy hardcore porn for just four bucks more than the price of a movie ticket, and that would have provided more honest entertainment--relatively speaking, of course. Fortunately for me, someone paid for my viewing of Oliver Stone's atrociously cheap thrill.

That said, I can't resist pointing out the latest obvious idiocy of Our Dear Leader. I haven't been laid in sixteen years. Masturbation is a mortal sin. So, I admit it: I need cheap thrills. And besides, a certain Lutheran pastor loves to consign me to hell because I am dishonoring the powers that be. Whenever some loony Protestant heretic consigns me to hell, I know I am doing something right.

So, here is the latest feculence of the Leader of the Free World. He spewed this out this morning:

The government's involvement is limited in scope. The government will not exercise control over any private firm. Federal officers will not have a seat around your local bank's boardroom table. The shares owned by the government will have voting rights that can be used only to protect the taxpayers' investment, not to direct the firm's operations.

So, the government will let the firms do whatever the hell they want, like, say, I don't know, leveraging out the wazoo so they can invest in securities backed by mortgages on crackhouses, but the government will protect the taxpayers' investment anyway. That's like a father paying for his teenager's driver's insurance and telling the teenager that he can drive however he likes.

Europeans like to ridicule us as stupid. Do you wonder why?

Ralph Nader makes an obvious Chomskyite point about the bogus Bill Ayers sideshow

2008-10-16T17:18:00.001-05:00

Second, on the Bill Ayers thing, who is a lapsed small-time saboteur with the Weather Underground many years ago, what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals. They have killed over a million Iraqi civilians as a result of that criminal invasion. That’s where the discussion should have focused on. The big-time terrorists, the state terrorists in the White House who have violated our Constitution, our statutes and our international treaties, and have been condemned even by the American Bar Association for a continual violence of our—violation of our Constitution.
--Ralph Nader on Democracy Now!, October 16, 2008

God, I would love to vote for Nader. Unfortunately, he supports legal abortion. Damn!

Sarah Palin is a fascist

2008-10-14T07:49:00.001-05:00

In response to jeering protesters at a campaign rally, Mrs. Palin scolded her loud detractors, saying that she hoped that they had enough honor to thank the soldiers in Iraq for having given them the right to protest. Last time I checked our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, it says that our Creator gives us our rights, not men with guns. If Palin is correct and Jefferson wrong and men with guns are indeed the source of one's rights, then does this mean that there was no right to protest in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? After all, men with guns in those regimes regarded what we see as rights as crimes of high treason. Do guns determine what is right and what is wrong? Mrs. Palin thinks so. Conclusion: Sarah Palin is a fascist.

Frankie Schaeffer weighs in on the matter of proportionality and backs Obama

2008-10-13T14:36:00.002-05:00

[I usually do not post unoriginal stuff to my weblog, but this is important. Frankie Schaeffer, son of the indefatigable anti-abortion activist and well-known Evangelical Francis Schaeffer, is backing the infanticidal maniac Barack Obama. As you will, I hope, read, he did not come to this decision lightly. He still thinks legal abortion is evil but thinks that electing wingnuts horny for Armageddon is even more evil. Yeah, well I am glad to hear someone repeating what I have been barking about for some time now. That said, I cannot vote for Obama. Obama's stance on abortion truly disgusts me. I just can't understand why the Democratic Party, the party that is professedly for the "little guy", pledges to protect the "right" to treat the littlest of them all as disposable garbage. Mr. Schaeffer's pro-life stance has become obviously compromised. Just as pro-life supporters of Bush compromised their commitment to the sanctity of human life by making sophistic apologies for the murderous doctrine of preventive war, Mr. Schaeffer has shamefully compromised his credibility on life by now indulging what I call the "economic argument to salve the consciences of pro-choice Christian heretics". The argument goes like this: Make the economy more amenable for poor people so they can afford to have children instead of having to kill them. The argument gets the notion of economic justice precisely backasswards. One fights for economic justice because life is sacred, but the Christian supporters of Kerry were arguing that the latter depends on the former. In other words, human life is sacred only if it is affordable. This was the argument Catholic dissidents used to justify their votes for Kerry in 2004. It stunk then, it stinks now. Catholic dissidents are usually the type who will say "Capitalism sucks", and yet those were the very same people who were saying in effect that economics should determine human worth. The whole fucking point of saying "Capitalism sucks" is to resist the idea that money should determine human worth. Catholic dissidents are not only heretical; they are profoundly stupid. I will be damned if I vote for McCain. I will be damned if I vote for Obama. I want a viable third party. Oh, one more thing: Frankie Schaeffer is no longer an Evangelical. He converted to Eastern Orthodoxy some years ago and, as far as I know, still is Eastern Orthodox.--PSR]

October 13, 2008
Schaefferweb
Former McCain Supporter Accuses the Senator of “Deliberately Feeding the Most Unhinged Elements of Our Society the Red Meat of Hate”

Frank Schaeffer, bestselling author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. He is the son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer and considered himself a lifelong Republican. He voted for John McCain in 2000, and McCain even endorsed one of Schaeffer’s earlier books on military service. On Friday, Schaeffer published ‘An Open Letter to John McCain’ in the Baltimore Sun.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the McCain campaign’s strategy of repeatedly invoking Senator Obama’s connection to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. It seems to very clearly have a serious effect of riling up crowds of McCain and Palin supporters, to a point that Senator McCain was booed at his own rally Friday when he attempted to defend his rival against character attacks.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: I want to be president of the United States, and obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be, but I have to tell you, I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States.

AUDIENCE: [booing]

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Now, I just—now, I just—now, look, I—if I didn’t think I wouldn’t be one heck of a lot better president, I wouldn’t be running, OK? And that’s the point.

AMY GOODMAN: The Republican presidential nominee was speaking to a crowd near Minneapolis Friday. His attempt to defend Senator Obama was met with jeers.

At a Palin rally earlier in the week, Governor Palin referred to Senator Obama as a man connected to “a former domestic terrorist.” She said she was “fearful” of his vision of America.

GOV. SARAH PALIN: I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America, as the greatest source for good in this world. I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.

AMY GOODMAN: While Governor Palin was speaking about Obama, an audience member, it’s believed, yelled out, “Kill him!” It’s unclear if Palin heard the remark, but she didn’t respond.

Obama was eight years old when, forty years ago, Bill Ayers was a member of the militant antiwar group, the Weather Underground. Today, Bill Ayers is a tenured professor and leading expert on education reform at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

At another moment last week during the presidential debate, McCain referred to Obama as “that one.”

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: It was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney. You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one. You know who voted against it? Me.

AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest, joining us from Boston, is Frank Schaeffer, the bestselling author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. He’s the son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer, considered himself a lifelong Republican. He voted for John McCain in 2000. McCain even endorsed one of Schaeffer’s earlier books on military service. But on Friday, Frank Schaeffer published an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun excoriating McCain for “feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate.” The op-ed is entitled "An Open Letter to John McCain.” Frank Schaeffer joins us now from Boston.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Can you—do you, by chance, have the letter in front of you?

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yes, I do. I have it right here. What would you like to hear?

AMY GOODMAN: Could you read it to us?

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Sure. This is the op-ed.

“John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as ‘not one of us,’ I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

“At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, ‘Kill him!’ At one of your rallies, someone called out, ‘Terrorist!’ Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee—an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

“Shame!

“John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

“You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

“John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that [surround] the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are [a bitterly divided country] on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

“Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

“John McCain, you’re walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out ‘Terrorist’ or ‘Kill him,’ history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

“John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

“Change the atmosphere of your campaign. Talk about the issues at hand. Make your case. But stop stirring up the lunatic fringe of haters, or risk suffering the judgment of history and the loathing of the American people—forever.

“We will hold you responsible.”

So that was the piece, and it got quite a response, actually. I’ve been swamped with email, and encouragingly, most of it—most of it favorable.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Frank Schaeffer, you supported John McCain in 2000, as you write.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned my book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. And really, people who have read that book will know that I come from an evangelical family that was really evangelical royalty in the ’70s and ’80s. My father was a frequent guest in the Reagan, Bush and also even the Ford White House—Bush, first, that is. And my background, therefore, was very unthinkingly Republican. We were always just associated with these folks. And so, in 2000, I was actually on a number of evangelical and right-wing stations, like with Ollie North, for instance, on his radio station, pleading the cause of John McCain, who I thought would be a much better candidate than George W. Bush.

But really, over the years, distancing myself from that evangelical background, as I talk about in the book, I’ve come to a place where I really see what Max Blumenthal was talking about in the earlier part of your show, and that is, you know, speaking of the secessionists in Alaska, the evangelical right-wing subculture in this country, particularly the Assemblies of God, by the way, that Sarah Palin comes from, have really already ceded from our union, in the sense of the fact that they have, you know, between home schooling and their own schools, their own publishing, their own radio, their own TV, many times very fundamentally anti-American, waiting for the Apocalypse, waiting for Jesus to take everybody away in the Rapture, weirdly Christian Zionist and at the same time assuming that the Jews will all be killed in Armageddon, when Jesus comes back, as part of their Rapture enterprise.

You know, just to put it frankly, the evangelical movement that I grew up in as a child used to be a fairly respectable and respectable—respectful group of people. They regarded themselves as Americans and part of the system. And now, I really think it’s been taken over by a group of people that have to be described fairly as just wing nuts. And if you read Crazy for God, you’re going to find, through my own journey, coming out of the ’50s and ’60s, that I watched all this change. I mean, you know, I preached from Jerry Falwell’s pulpit. He sent a jet up to get me once. You know, I know Pat Robertson and Dr. Dobson and all these people personally. And the fact of the matter is, the movement has gone off the rails.

And the dangerous thing about Sarah Palin is, is that there’s a very direct line from her to the kind of extremism that would literally destroy this country. So, you know, when you look at what eight years of George Bush has done to our economy, on one side, when you look at the war we’re in in Iraq—and, by the way, my son was in the Marine Corps and fought twice in Afghanistan, took one mission to Iraq, one to the Horn of Africa, so I speak as someone whose son actually was out there getting shot at because of these policies. When you look at all this, as I talk about in the book, what you see is that we really are at a crossroads here.

This election is not just an election. This election is a mirror that is being held up to the United States, saying you can choose what sort of country you want to be. Do you want to be with the Sarah Palin wing nuts who are bearing high-powered rifles in their gardens for the time when the United Nations sends Black Hawk helicopter-type missions against America? You know, do you want to assume that Jesus will be coming back to rapture everybody, so you hope there’s an atheist co-pilot in every plane? I know this sounds laughable, but there are tens of millions of Americans who are buying into this crap. Or do you want to be a member of the United States of America—Republican, Democrat, left, right, center, but part of the American family? Or have you already ceded from our union?

So, basically, I think what this election is about and what my book is certainly about is, besides the politics, besides whether we have Barack Obama or John McCain as our president, is also another kind of a choice, and that is, are we going to give the right-wing evangelical/fundamentalist wing nuts of all stripes, of the Sarah Palin types, a voice in literally destroying this democracy? Do you want another eight years like the eight years that have passed, double, triple, and go from there?

So, you know, my problem with McCain now is that by nominating Sarah Palin and, as I talked about in this editorial, by opening the floodgates of hate because of his ambition to win, basically doing whatever it takes to do that, he’s clearly choosing to try to empower the America that will destroy the real America. When I say “the real America,” I mean people who are proud of their country. So we’ve come to a very weird place. We have Sarah Palin, who talks about Barack Obama not liking his country enough. Her husband and her are associated with secessionists, so we have someone who wants to run for vice president who doesn’t even want the union to hang together, who would have fought on the other side in the Civil War, as it were, when it comes to the States, you know, going up against Barack Obama, who I personally think would make a terrific president. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Franks Schaeffer, I want to just—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —come in here on that—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —because it’s very significant, your endorsement of Barack Obama, considering where you come from and your own beliefs.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, your father was a famous evangelical preacher—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —a person who gave sermons around the world. Really, you convinced him to take up the anti-abortion line—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: —to make it central to his philosophy and your own.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, here you are, anti-choice, pro-life, and pro-Obama, Senator Obama, who is fiercely pro-choice.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Right, right. And you know what? It’s an imperfect world, but I would rather have a president that I disagree with on the issue of choice who’s fit to be president than an old man who has just shown such a lack of judgment as to literally connect himself to the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe. It isn’t just someone you disagree with politically. That’s one point.

And I’d say something else about the choice issue. I am pro-life. I haven’t changed in that regard. If people read my book, Crazy for God, they’ll see that I’ve gone left, if you want to put it that way, in many, many areas, but not that one. But I actually believe that if your interest is not ideology and ideological purity, but rather abortion itself, i.e. you want more or less abortions, that the medical and social programs that Barack Obama is talking about for our country, in terms of care of women and children and families, improvement in education and possibilities for all Americans, actually will result in less abortions. So my interest in the abortion issue is that I think abortion is a tragedy. My interest is not the politics of it, as in always appearing to vote for the person who has the correct ideology.

And so, I think there’s a choice for Americans interested in this issue who are like me, pro-life, and that is, do you want to choose ideological purity attached to a party that will so destroy our economy and all the social programs that there will be more abortions, i.e. as there have been through the Republican-controlled years, when they’ve been talking about this issue for thirty years and done nothing about it for actually helping women and children, or would you rather have a president like Barack Obama, who you disagree with on this one ideological point, in terms of what you might call the theology of the issue, but whose program would practically result in a more conducive environment for families to prosper, for people to have children, for kids to go to school, for women to be taken care of? And I would rather vote for a person who’s going to do the job rather than just have the correct ideology.

AMY GOODMAN: Frank Schaeffer, also on this point of terror and terrorists, you make a very interesting point. I read your—was reading your book throughout yesterday and last night, and about—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Thank you. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —about your dad and about being invited to the White House by President Reagan—

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —by President Bush, Sr., by President Ford, and you talked about him calling for the violent overthrow of the United States, yet still being invited to the White House.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah. I mean, the hypocrisy is total. Again, it goes back to what Max Blumenthal was saying. And, by the way, I totally commend him. I hope everybody goes to his website and looks at this. This is a huge and underreported story he was talking about, and he is getting to the nub of it. So, well done, Max Blumenthal.

But people who read Crazy for God will come to see that what I decided was happening was that the people who were talking from the right were actually—about patriotism and wrapping themselves in the flag were actually, in a weird way, profoundly anti-American. They wanted disaster. The worse the country got, the closer it was to Christ coming back, the more you needed Christians to tell you to accept Jesus as your savior. You know, they needed—they needed an apocalyptic frame of mind.

AMY GOODMAN: We have eight seconds.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Yeah. So, essentially, yeah, I would just say, you know, my point is, there was a hypocrisy, because the anti-Americanism was very much in the right while the right was talking about and pointing the finger at the left.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Frank Schaeffer, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a film director, former evangelical Christian. Latest book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. He has written "An Open Letter to John McCain".

Nuns on the Run

2008-10-13T12:02:00.008-05:00

Homeland Security has declared two Catholic nuns to be terrorists. Now I can sleep at night knowing that my knuckles are a little bit safer from those hags' rulers. It's about time someone did something about those vicious viragoes! I can't even write my name without having agonizing flashbacks to my grade school days when those sadistic scolds gave me premature arthritis because my "s" looked too risqué. Oh, the horrors!! Thank you, Homeland Security, for protecting me from those pure incarnations of ruthless evil! You are making the world safe for bad penmanship!

Francis Fukuyama, call your office

2008-10-09T21:10:00.004-05:00

The Oracle, Ayn Rand's Talmudist, Alan Greenspan hath spoken:

The crisis will mean a return to the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. Many of us thought that struggle was over with the collapse of the command economies, but this is not the case.

So, history has resumed, Frank. Bummer, now you have to write another afterword.

Then again, I may be crowing too soon. After all, Bush now has the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team at the ready to quell any resurgence of the, er, Hegelian Dialectic and thereby make sure that the End of History remains so.

A quick note on the politics of Abortion

2008-10-08T15:19:00.007-05:00

The anti-choice argument against Obama is crystal clear, of course. Obama would, if elected, appoint Supreme Court justices who would uphold Roe, and that's the exact opposite of what the anti-choice crowd wants. Okay, so one who wants abortion outlawed should vote for McCain, right? Well, er, not so fast...

As I have written before in this space, the Republicans do not want Roe overturned. Once Roe is no longer on the table, then abortion becomes a state issue, and the Republicans will no longer be able to keep the Conservative Christian Voting Bloc hostage. To be sure, the current Republican Regime has obtained an important victory for the anti-choice cause, the upholding of the partial birth abortion ban. But look at the decision that upheld it. Who wrote it? None other than the guy who wrote the majority opinion in Casey, the decision that allowed restrictions on abortion while upholding the "central holding" of Roe. None of the other justices of the majority wrote concurring opinions, not Alito, not Roberts, not Thomas, not even Scalia. Those pro-life justices let the pro-Roe Anthony Kennedy speak for them. The message of the court was clear: we will go this far restricting abortion but no further.

But let's say McCain is not a cynic on abortion, as even some Christian Conservatives think he is. He gets elected, Justice Stevens or Ginsburg finally drops, McCain sends in an anti-choice replacement, and the court finally has an anti-Roe majority. Roe still will not be overturned. A state has to challenge it first. An individual can't because he has no standing. Roe affects the laws of the states, and so only states have standing to challenge it. So, what state will do so? It looked like South Dakota would, but then it chickened out. Well, if not even South Dakota is brave enough to challenge Roe , it looks like Roe will be safe even if a McCain presidency tries to get an anti-Roe majority on the court. And that is a huge "if". Sad, but true.

Of course, there is always this possibility: McCain gets elected, Stevens drops, McCain appoints a judge who hates Roe with a livid vengeance, and Louisiana decides that it is Catholic and challenges Roe. But before her lawyers can even file motions, McCain triggers thermonuclear war with Russia, Sarah Palin is raptured, and the rest of us, Louisiana's lawyers included, are blown to oblivion.

An interesting Quote from 2005

2008-09-29T19:36:00.000-05:00

...a global financial crisis in part provoked by its own reckless economic policies would permit the U.S. government to finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens except for the ratcheting up of that military and police power that might be needed to quell social unrest and compel global discipline. Saner voices within the capitalist class, having listened carefully to the warnings of the likes of Paul Volker that there is a high probability of a serious financial crisis in the next five years, may prevail. But this will mean rolling back some of the privileges and power that have over the last thirty years been accumulating in the upper echelons of the capitalist class. Previous phases of capitalist history--one thinks of 1873 or the 1920s--when a similarly stark choice arose, do not augur well. The upper classes, insisting on the sacrosanct nature of their property rights, preferred to crash the system rather than surrender any of their privileges and power. In so doing they were not oblivious of their own interest, for if they position themselves aright they can, like good bankruptcy lawyers, profit from a collapse while the rest of us are caught most horribly in the deluge. A few of them may get caught and end up jumping out of Wall Street windows, but that is not the norm. The only fear they have is of political movements that threaten them with expropriation and revolutionary violence.

--David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, pp. 152-3

Quick obvious thoughts on Sarah Palin

2008-09-29T06:44:00.002-05:00

Well, of course, Sarah Palin is a ridiculous, scatterbrained ditz. So much so, in fact, that the now much-discussed SNL parody of Couric's Palin interview used Palin's actual words. But this will not hurt McCain's candidacy. If anything, it will help it. For two reasons:

1) McCain needs to distance himself from Bush somehow. He cannot do so with regard to foreign policy, of course. The doctrine of preventive war seems to be his DNA. He cannot do so with regard to the economy simply because he's clueless. But he can pick a complete idiot for his running mate, someone no one would mistake for some crafty, secretive cloak-and-dagger Svengali. McCain has promised that his VP won't plot a fascist coup d'etat in the wings. She's just too stupid.

2) Picking a stupid running mate has been a Republican tradition since at least Spiro Agnew. A country club party must throw some kind of sop to the idea of democratic egalitarianism, after all. If this idiot can become president, well, so can my kid who is now flunking Kindergarten. All this ridicule of Palin's run-on sentences and her outright ignorance will just serve to win the vote of the resentful dunces. Thanks to our public school system, this voting bloc is nothing to sneeze at.

Oh, by the way, Darrell Hammond's McCain was bad. It wasn't McCain. It was Dana Carvey's George H. W. Bush.

An open letter to Miss Stone about Atheism

2008-09-28T23:13:00.004-05:00

Dear Miss Stone,

I really would like to bone you. Because you are a very beautiful, intelligent, well-read young woman, who makes a disgusting middle-age lech like myself slobber. Of course, you don't like it when I am so blunt and crass. This is, of course, eminently understandable. Women don't like lovemaking treated like a grudge match among wrestling posers. Well, most women don't, anyway, and the few women who do are idiots. Miss Stone, you are certainly not an idiot.

So, since the blunt and crass approach has not worked. I have decided to embark on old-fashioned wooing, which I am not good at. This requires wit, charm, patience, and tact. Some people think I have wit, but almost everyone who knows me will say that, if I have wit, I lack the other three. I don't have charm because I don't have tact, and tact, as Cordelia Chase memorably put it (in the only good line of the worst written episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever), "is just not saying true stuff." And I don't have any patience because, well, I have not been laid in over sixteen years.

So, I've tried wooing you by trying to be interested in what you are interested in. You were raised a Baptist, and now it seems you really enjoy being as godless and decadent as you can. You devour the novels of Tom Robbins. You quote Bukowski. I don't quite understand why women who like the wife-beater Bukowski object to crass propositions from old men. Wasn't that Bukowski's entire Schtick? But no matter. You revel in godless mischief, and I thought I might perk your interest in me if I told you that I was at least reading up on all this godlessness. In a recent internet exchange, I informed you that I was reading Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray, hoping you would say something like, say, oh, that's kinky, you can ravish me now. But, no, you did not. If you did, it would have been meaningless, anyway. We have a lack of proximity, a necessary (but hardly sufficient) condition for intimacy of any kind. I am in Illinois, and you are somewhere in godless Europe with all those huge Grüfte und Grabmäler Gottes. Requiem aeternam deo.

Your only response was, "Yay Atheism!"

The second that this popped on my screen, my libido vanished. Admittedly at the age of forty it does not take much to kill my libido. But even when I was 19, when I professed to be an atheist, atheism never thrilled me. It made me bash my head against walls, actually. After all, atheism means that when you die, you die and that's it. Atheism is recognition of a death sentence.

I suspect, Miss Stone, that Atheism for you is liberating. The benign indifference of the universe means that there is no Baptist God who will smite you down for dancing, drinking wine, or voting Democratic. Yes, the Preacher's Daughter can finally run amok and have fun with a clear conscience.

But you can't have too much fun because that will make you addicted to the joys of this life. A true Atheist like Michel Onfray or Albert Camus knows that such addictions only make it harder to accept the brutal fact of death. One who loves wine wants to drink wine forever. One who revels in making love wants to make love forever and so on and so forth. Atheism denies the possibility of eternal life and therewith eternal joy. So, you can't really love anything. Love makes you an unhealthy addict to life. I love my dear mother. She's dead, but I can't stop loving her. That's why I am a practicing Catholic. I refuse to accept death. Michel Onfray would say, of course, that I am delusional, that I prefer a nice comforting fairy tale to the brutal truth. Fine, but ich kann nicht anders. Love made me an addict to eternity. So, my dear, if you really want to be an atheist, you must renounce love. Otherwise, the prospect of death will be nastier than withdrawal is for a heroin junkie.

Atheism is simply Buddhism. You must forsake all attachments if you are ever to accept nothingness. True, you are free of that dour party-pooping, teatotaling Baptist God and the subliterate villains in Footloose. You are also free of so much more, love, devotion, and meaning.

But you are not free of purpose. Atheists have a purpose. But it is not what Michael Harris thinks it is. Harris would have you believe that atheism is making the world safe for the Enlightenment. Harris is not an atheist. He is devoted to the worship of the Philosophes and prays with all the solemnity of a monk at Vespers that their legacy be forever, world without end, amen. It is not what Dawkins thinks it is, leading a complacent upper-middle-class life while rereading the books of Douglas Adams, whom he misses so much that he probably secretly believes in heaven. The Atheist's purpose is certainly not a Herumspringa for Preacher's Daughters. It is nothing more thrilling or transcendent than learning how to refuse the seductions of thrills and transcendence. It is simply learning how to die, and I'll be damned to know why that is worth a cheer.

Oh, and I want to apologize to you, Miss Stone, for being so rude as to tell you that I wanted to bone you. That was not only outrageously ungentlemanly of me, it was also quite unromantic, of course. But, I should add, true Atheists have no truck with romance. Romantics, as Nietzsche noted, inevitably become Christians.

File this under DUH!

2008-09-24T07:19:00.001-05:00

Sorry, I have to correct a really glaring error. In a past entry I wrote:

All that is new with Bush is the shamelessly blatant assertion that we have the right to invade any country we damn well please, and it is precisely the utter shamelessness with which this "right" is asserted that is new. Past administrations were somewhat more decorous.

Well, that is wrong. Past adminstrations were not more decorous about asserting this Hitlerian right--not even somewhat. One need only think of Reagan with Grenada or Poppy Bush with Panama or McKinley with Spain or Polk with Mexico . Therefore, there is nothing new at all with the foreign policy doctrine of Bush der Zweite. The so-called Bush Doctrine is nothing other than traditional American foreign policy. This is obvious, and I should have known as much. Boy, do I feel stupid and scatter-brained. Can I be John McCain's running mate now?

A Post for Mr. H. about the Catholic Conception of Confession

2008-09-18T08:02:00.001-05:00

[A Protestant has asked me to explain why Catholics seek absolution from a priest. I don't feel like writing anything new. Hence, this recycled post.--PSR]

A few years ago I met an old friend from my undergraduate days. This man is one of the sweetest, even saintliest people I know, and he is an evangelical Protestant. At Washington U. I was a very loud and very cheeky atheist, and my blasphemous cheekiness caught the attention of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship which tried its darndest to get me to abandon my atheism and accept Christ as my personal saviour. Well, the Fellowship failed, and Deo gratias for that. Otherwise I fear that I would now be a Bush-supporting happy clappy evangelical. If that ever happens to me, I would hope that someone would have the presence of mind to give me an overdose of morphine.

Anyway, this very sweet man was part of the team that tried to convert me. When we met a few years ago, he was very glad to know that I had returned to the Catholic Faith, and I, truth be told, was somewhat disappointed that he was still a Protestant. He did tell me that he was an avid viewer of EWTN, and I pretty much left it at that. I figured that if he was watching Mother Angelica, he didn't need my sales pitch, which can really be overbearing and, hence, alienating. I keep forgetting the essential maxim of apologetics: win an argument, lose a convert.

But we did continue to discuss religion. He had a veritable horror story to tell me.

Ten years ago he told me that he had done something just awful. Really awful. It filled him with existential dread. In fact, the magnitude of his sin was so great that he thought he had done the sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost. As every reader of the Bible knows--and he was an avid reader of the Bible--this is the only unforgivable sin. My friend spent the next decade utterly convinced that he was doomed to an eternity in hell.

Yet, he soldiered on with his faith not because he had any benefit from it but because of his duty to the truth. God bless this man. But the thoughts of hell obviously were taking their toll. He was not only empty but ravaged to the point where he just could not bear any longer this inescapable damnation, and so he decided finally one day just to say that God had forgiven him. That made him feel better. Yes, this was very much a Protestant way out, deciding for yourself what is forgivable and what is not, but it is better than the alternative, suicide, which, by the way, is the unforgivable sin.

I have since been told that this horror story is a very common phenomenon in evangelical Protestantism, and actually there happens to be a very good reason why it is common. Sola scriptura, the doctrine that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith. This doctrine simply begs the question of interpretation. How do you know that your interpretation is the one that God wants? The evangelical answer to this is simply that you are filled with the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost makes sure that you read the scripture properly. Okay, fine. How do you know you are filled with the Holy Ghost. You just feel it. You have this great sense of freedom. You feel accepted. You feel loved. You want to sing 7-11 songs all day and just do the will of Christ in sunny gratitude for His awesome sacrifice on the cross.

Okay, but what happens if this feeling goes away? What happens when you just don't feel like doing yet another verse of "Our God is an awesome God"? What happens in a moment of weakness you actually sin and suddenly feel like an ungrateful schmuck who has spat upon the crucified Christ? You pick up your Bible and flip to Romans 5 and try to remind yourself of God's mindboggling love with verse 8: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." That verse used to make you feel so happy, but for some reason it fills you this time with gall. Why? And then Mark 3:39 and Luke 12:10 bang off the walls of your mind as rudely as the Grim Reaper's knock. Your sin was not just any sin, it was the eternal sin, the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, and that explains why Romans 5:8 offers you no solace anymore. You have spoken against the Holy Ghost, and in consequence the Holy Ghost has left you. You are now irrevocably hellbound.

But wait a minute! Your sin may have been terrible, but you know others who've done the same thing, In fact, you know people who've mentioned the very same sins in their testimonies. Surely they are saved and are righteous and Godly people. But why does your stomach still feel like it's about to rupture? Because it's not the sin, it's how you did it. You did it with malice, deliberation, and glee. You didn't care about the Spirit inside you. In fact, you now remember you may have said to hell with the Spirit as you committed your despicable sin with wild abandon. Well, did you? You must have because you no longer can read your Bible with the same exhilaration, with the same joy. You can no longer feel the indwelling of the Spirit. That can only mean that, yes, you have blasphemed against the Holy Ghost. You are going to hell.

This reasoning is the inevitable result of the evangelical's concept of sola scriptura. If the Bible and the feeling of the Spirit inside you are all you have to guide your faith, then if you don't feel indwelt, you're just screwed. The Bible never defines what exactly blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is and is, hence, vulnerable to all sorts of interpretations. Now, when you feel indwelt, you obviously think you're in good with the Holy Ghost and so obviously you'll not pay attention to Christ's warnings about the eternal sin. It's only when you feel forsaken by the Spirit, that those passages become a concern, and how are you to interpret them rightly? You need the Spirit to do that, but He's gone, and your mind is warped with sin. A very vicious circle has ensnared you.

I'd imagine that a lot of people would say at this point, "Well, screw this!," and relapse to their previous buzzes, be it drink, drugs, meaningless sex, or New Age Cults. But then there are people like my friend who was in it for more than the spiritual buzz. He wanted truth, and, again, may God bless him, but the solipsism inherent in his evangelical Protestantism made his individual conscience into a ruthless, merciless Holy Inquisition that damned him even beyond Maranatha. I repeat, he could have killed himself, and thank God he did not. He managed to escape his own mind, but it took a decade of torture to do it.

This is just one reason why the Catholic Church insists that we confess our sins to a priest. Sin makes us, of course, less like Christ and, therefore, less merciful, and the greater the guilt, the less merciful we will be with ourselves. It's absurd to expect that in such a state we can see God's forgiveness clearly. No, we need to hear the words of forgiveness from outside of our warped minds. And that's why Christ was not only merciful but supremely wise to institute the sacrament of confession. Nothing brings more peace this side of the eschaton than to hear a human voice actually say "I forgive you."

Sarah Palin's Church: I just gotta ask

2008-09-18T08:02:00.000-05:00

Why do Evangelical churches look like Wal-Mart Stores? Is it because evangelicals believe that America is God's Country and since America is the land of consumer capitalism, churches, therefore, must look like warehouses?

George Will is a Sophist

2008-09-14T12:30:00.003-05:00

George Will has carefully nutured the persona of an impartial if somewhat curmudgeonly sage, who prefers a reasoned argument to ideological cheerleading. Well, persona means mask, of course, and, hence is a lie. Will is a partisan hack. If anyone has a doubt about this, then he is dumb enough to think Sarah Palin is anything more than a Beauty Queen Ditz. It was simply embarrassing to hear George Will defending Palin's scatter-brained answers in her interview with Charlie Gibson. Will said that he wouldn't have been able to say what the Bush Doctrine, either, because that question has three possible answers. Gibson should have given Palin a multiple choice exam, instead of essay questions. Because one can crib for the former, I presume.

The full answer, according to Will, is not just the right to anticipatory self-defense, but also the notion that the spread of democracy will make the world a safer place and that we must bomb the bejeebers out of not just the terrorists but anyone who gives them safe haven as well. Gibson mentioned only the first. So, the teacher got it wrong, and if the teacher got it wrong, then why should we expect that poor little girl to get it right? Charlie Gibson is the idiot. We should take away his merit pay and make him stay after school to pound the erasers.

Except that Gibson gave the right answer, even if it was somewhat oversimplified. That we should attack those countries that harbor terrorists is implied by the doctrine of preventive war. The former is merely a corollary of the latter. I suspect George Will took geometry some time in his life. He should know what a corollary is.

As to the spread of democracy, that is hardly part of the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine does not want to spread democracy. If it did, then why did we support Pakistan when it was a dictatorship and start bombing it the minute democracy took over? Did we welcome the democratically elected Hamas with open arms? We'd rather let Lebanon go down in a civil war than see Hezbollah have any share at all in that country's democratic government. And, of course, we insist that our troops stay in Iraq even though the Iraqi people and its democratically elected government want the exact opposite. This talk about spreading democracy is simply a lie to make us feel better about waging unjustified wars that impoverish, maim, and kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. And this lie is not even new with Bush. It is at least as old as the Woodrow Wilson administration.

All that is new with Bush is the shamelessly blatant assertion that we have the right to invade any country we damn well please, and it is precisely the utter shamelessness with which this "right" is asserted that is new. Past administrations were somewhat more decorous. They thought it prudent not to make the comparisons with Adolf Hitler too easy. Perhaps, because they know that our schools are so bad and that the citizenry is so uneducated and stupid, the Bushies could expect that no one nowadays would know that the big crime Nazi Germany was accused of is precisely the cornerstone of the Bush Foreign Policy, namely waging wars of unprovoked aggression. Judging by how many people are going ga-ga over a stupid scatter-brained glamour girl like Sarah Palin, I must reluctantly say that this expectation is more justified than the claim of WMDs in Iraq ever was. The only reason why McCain did not choose Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan as his running mate is simply because they are all under 35 and therefore are constitutionally ineligible for the job.

Sarah Palin is a Motherfucking Whacko

2008-09-10T05:31:00.006-05:00

Right after Palin was named McCain's personal nurse, various groups wanted to meet with her, among them a pro-life group. Ms. Palin is supposedly pro-life because she wants abortion outlawed even in cases of rape and incest. I do as well. I am a Catholic who believes in the sanctity of human life, after all.

By the way, one need not be a faithful Catholic to believe that life begins at fertilization. That is not an article of faith as the Catholic Joe Biden would have us believe. It is rather a simple fact of embryology, something that can be known without recourse to the Bible, the Pope, or prayer. No leap of faith is necessary. A leap of faith is, however, required to maintain that even though Obama's running mate helped lie this country into the Iraq War, Obama is still the anti-war candidate. You also have to drink Kool-Aid in Obamatown, but I digress.

Anyway, so, Ms. Palin was to talk to a pro-life group last week, but she canceled that meeting. She was so busy being brought up to speed by the McCain camp (she had to learn when to do his tube feedings, for instance) that she had to cancel all such meetings--except one, that is: her meeting with AIPAC. The anti-abortion lobby can wait, but bowing down before Israel--even though that country recognizes the legality of what evangelicals like Ms. Palin say is an abomination, namely gay "marriage"--cannot.

But it should not shock that Israel would be Ms. Palin's overarching priority. Israel is what rules her party's pathetic excuse for a foreign policy, and it is also key to the apocalypse which will soon let Ms. Palin and her brood see Jesus--well, maybe not her daughter Bristol because she is an unclean slut. Ms. Palin is a member of an Assembly of God church. She is a Pentecostal. That means she speaks in tongues. That means she speaks gibberish. For example, when she says the Iraq War is a mission not of, say, really greedy and sick, cynical fucks at Haliburton but of God, she is speaking in tongues.

Being Pentecostal also means in her case that she believes in the pre-tribulation rapture. Her Church is known to use the Scofield Reference Bible, the notes of which were primarily responsible for the spread of the Rapture Heresy among evangelicals in the United States. The Rapture Heresy or Dispensationalism basically says that when Israel rebuilds the temple, Jesus will come and rapture all the evangelicals and then deliver the world over to famine, boils, and thermonuclear war. So, she is supporting Israel not because she likes Jews or falafels or even because she wants to protect the "Only Democracy in the Middle East" (which is a lie, anyway). She supports Israel because Israel by her lights will bring the end of the world as we know it, and considering how Israel is egging us on to bomb even more countries in the Middle East, she may very well be right, and I for one don't want to see if she is.

For anyone who is interested to know more about this dispensationalist bullshit, I have a much more detailed description here.

That Ms. Palin found the time in her busy schedule to speak to the Israeli Lobby but not to the anti-abortion groups shows that she is more interested in rebuilding the temple and triggering the apocalypse than she is in overturning Roe v. Wade. Catholic Bishops should make note of this if they want to tell us again to vote pro-life. Voting for Armageddon is hardly pro-life.

Ms. Palin is a motherfucking nutcase, every bit as zealously irrational as our propaganda machine makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad out to be, and only an idiot would want this bozo bitch a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Hallowe'en and its Discontents (a post for Miss Lutheran)

2008-09-03T17:16:00.006-05:00

[The occasion for posting this really old piece is learning of yet another frustration that dear Miss Lutheran is having with the Evangicals. She apparently sends her little boy to a grade school run by these lunatics, and they, presumably thinking that Hallowe'en is a satanic festivity, have made its celebration strengstens verboten. The School will have a Harvest Party instead. Yeah, I am sure first and second graders love dressing up as stalks of wheat. Ah, geez. This is just one reason (among many) why I would never be an Evangelical. This is also a reason why I don't consider myself a "traditionalist" Catholic anymore. "Trads" have a very strong tendency to frown upon any hint of fun. In fact, the piece below I originally wrote in response to anal retentive, Puritanical objections made by my fellow "trad" Catholics. These nuts don't want you even reading Shakespeare because patent blasphemies like "'Slid" will put you on the primrose path to the Mass in the Vernacular, and then it's only a matter of time before you will be leading the gay lifestyle in San Francisco and clamoring for priestesses who have burned their bras. The only fun these neo-Cromwellians seem to permit is making fun of Vatican II or ejaculating while anticipating the return of the Inquisition.

Anyway, this Evangelical School will let the kids dress up for the Harvest Party, but they may not dress as ghosts or even as superheroes like Batman or Spiderman. I hope some precocious kid piously asks if he may dress up as a New Testament Character and then comes to the party as the Gerasene Demoniac. Evangelicals are idiots.

Oh, for those who care, I am still deathly ill. Maybe I'll die before the first Presidential Debate. That would be a blessing.--PSR]

Must everything be kindlewood for a religious war? Well, yes. Sigh. Hallowe'en is fun. Why? It's fun to dress up as Dracula and affect a really thick Transylvanian accent. That should be reason enough to justify it. But, in this hyper-ideological age, fun unfortunately is not reason to do anything. Double sigh.

Okay, so let's be serious. There are two objections to the celebration of Hallowe'en (I insist upon the apostrophe, by the way) by Christians: 1) that, whatever its history may be, Hallowe'en has been taken over by the Satanists, Wiccans, and neo-Pagans and is, therefore, not an appropriate festivity for Christians and 2) that Hallowe'en has simply become a clever capitalist trick to rot our Children's teeth with really bad candy.

I answer that the Hallowe'en that is now being celebrated by the Darkside Wackos does not bear any resemblance to our Hallowe'en. Our Hallowe'en is based on the principle that because evil does not like to be mocked, we should by all means mock it. When a little five-year-old girl dresses up like a witch by putting on a conical made out of cardboard and smearing her face with green paint, she is being gloriously silly. The real witches hate this because to them witchcraft is a deadly serious business. They also hate it when this little girl goes around citing incantations with a high-pitched cackle of complete gibberish. How dare this little ignorant girl reduce our traditional spells to childish nonsense! This makes the real witches burn with indignation, and this is precisely why the little girl should have fun in her little witch costume.

Now, the Darkside Wackos that celebrate Hallowe'en are not silly. They are deadly serious. The Wiccans who dress up as Witches actually think by doing so they become Witches. So, they got to get the dress right. A cardboard conical hat? What, are you kidding? That would be too tacky! Yuck! No, they got to have the real thing. I have no clue as to what real witches wear these days. Robes made out of bat fur? A Necklace of the eyes of Newt? I don't know, but whatever it is (maybe whatever the Wiccan industry declares to be the Maleficarum fashion these days), they gotta have because, as we all know, clothes make the witch, eh? Also, these guys aren't satisfied with fake blood. No, no, no. They must have real blood. And so, of course, no rubber knives. I think you get the point. Of course, everyone will grant this distinction, but it will be objected that the distinction is not all that distinct for does not dressing up a witch bespeak a desire actually to be one? And, too, since everyone is dress up as witch, how is one to tell a good, silly witch from a deadly serious, fashion-conscious witch. In answer to the first objection, an actor who believes he is really King Lear is ripe for the Funny Farm.

Kids, it is true, have an over-active imagination, which could put them irretrievably into Neverland. Perhaps. I think this danger is exaggerated. Kids are also some of the best Thomists around, meaning they see things as they are. As long as the costumes are as cheesy as those in Doctor Who, kids won't be in any danger of blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality. I would suggest that it is precisely because kids know how to distinguish between reality and fantasy so well that they have such glorious imaginations. The ones who blur this distinction are a pretty dull lot. Take for example those who spend one third of their lives watching television (or those who swoon during a speech by Barack Obama).

As to the objection that it is hard to distinguish the good Hallowe'en from the bad, I think I have answered this, at least implicitly. Good Hallowe'en is silly and cheesy. Bad Hallowe'en is solemn and boring. I think this difference is intelligible enough. If you are at a Hallowe'en Party where instead of bobbing for apples, you have to hold hands in a circle and pray for the favor of a Celtic Goddess, you can safely assume you are at a bad Hallowe'en Party. If you are at a Party where the blood tastes like ketchup and you can see the zippers on the gorrilas, you are amid silliness and, therefore, safe.

As to the objection that Hallowe'en has become another clever capitalist trick, so has, unfortunately enough, Christmas. Abusus non tollit usum

A brief review of Shadia Drury's Aquinas and Modernity

2008-09-01T11:06:00.003-05:00

Professor Drury is a liberal but one who is keenly aware of the shortcomings of liberalism. She really loves pluralism, for instance, but really, really hates that it is susceptible to a relativism that eviscerates any knowable moral standard, without which society will sink into either anarchy or tyranny. Therefore, Drury is ambivalent about Aquinas. She hates him because he defended the Inquisition which savagely suppressed religious pluralism but finds his natural law theory full of promise. Unfortunately, this promise was dashed by Thomas' religious zealotry which made him think that what by Drury's lights could only be his own idiosyncratic concept of the divine law trumped all concerns for the universal natural law. Had he not been such a religiously blinkered bigot, Drury suggests he would have been the John Locke of 13th Century. But no.

Leaving aside the dubious claim that Locke's theory of natural right captures the natural law as such, I find it fascinating that a liberal wants us to think seriously about the natural law. Drury is rightly afraid of the lunacies of post-modernism and legal positivism. The former is anarchy, the latter tyranny. And Drury is right to believe that natural law, if it can be found and, more importantly, command a democratic consensus, will provide a certain truth that will protect us against both evils. But Drury, remember, is at heart, despite all her misgivings, a liberal. In fact, a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and as such thinks the state's protection of pluralism of belief is the non-negotiable sine qua non of the entire liberal project. People must be allowed to believe what they list. Otherwise, you get an inquisition, and the liberal project goes up in flames of an auto-de-fé.

Fine. But Natural Law Theory is predicated upon an essentialist anthropology. In other words, Natural Law Theory puts forward a definite belief about man that is supposed to be true everywhere and at all times. And for Natural Law Theory to be the basis of a regime, only one such theory can be adopted. There are conflicting Natural Law Theories after all. For instance, Aristotle and Aquinas thought the Natural Law basis for property was need. Locke thought it was labor. So, which Natural Law Theory do we pick? We can't have a government picking a plurality of them because then it would be divided against itself, and that would hardly be a remedy against post-modern absurdity. Drury surely doesn't want that. But if a regime picks one theory and orders its subjects to believe it, then so much for Drury's beloved pluralism. Professor Drury is quite obviously in a dilemma.

Drury is too smart, of course, not to realize this, but her only answer is that we must know that there is a certain Natural Law simply because both post-modernism and legal positivism are just too ridiculous or frightening to be true. So, we just have to think really hard about Natural Law and have long talks about it. Fine, but we've already talked about this stuff for nearly three millennia, and there is still no agreement on what is natural for the Human Being. The post-modernist, as silly as he may be, might have at least one good point when he says that this conversation ain't never gonna end and we might as well just make fun of it. And the legal positivist, as fascist as he certainly is, recognizes at least this much, that society can't rely on an endless seminar for its rules. There will be resigned skeptics and impatient tyrants until Natural Law Theorists come up with a concept of man that is as self-evidently true as the most basic of arithmetical equations, and even then... Gödel, call your office.

Torture and the Ticking Bomb Scenario

2008-09-01T06:04:00.001-05:00

[This is a post recycled from a review I wrote of The Dark Side by Jane Mayer. I post it here because I am too sick to write anything new and am too busy trying to translate Socrates's attempt to bugger Alcibiades. Anyway, some readers may think this post irrelevant because they believe the Bush administration claim either that we do not torture or that we no longer use those techniques widely believed to be torture. Well, everyone should know by now that the Bushies made the first claim with a straight face only because John Yoo pretty much defined torture away. And if you do not know this, then you do not deserve the right to vote. If you believe the second claim, please, call me; I've a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell.]

The Bush administration and its wind-up Nazi automaton apologists will often use the ticking bomb argument to justify the use of interrogation methods specifically proscribed by the Army Field Manual. Everyone knows this argument now because of the popularity of that piece of fascist propoganda, known as 24. There is going to a massive terrorist attack in the next few minutes, if not seconds. You have caught an important member of the plot who has the 411 on how to stop the attack, but he's not talking. The sound effects of a ticking digital clock are only getting louder. What do you do? You inflict severe, intense, anguishing pain upon the motherfucker until he sings, human rights be damned because human rights will only get entire cities with their innocent populations destroyed. So, the Bush Administration says pretty much that if we don't use these extraordinary interrogation methods, i.e. torture, we will have another 9/11. And many people find this argument credible just because they think Jack Bauer is way cool.

But this is complete bullshit for at least two reasons: 1) It implies that 9/11 happened because of our bleeding hearts, and that's false. It happened because of massive incompetence (which I am inclined to think was deliberate). 2) If we were really worried about the next imminent attack, then we would be using totally different torture techniques. Most if not all of the "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" that the Bushies insist are keeping us safe were designed to extract confessions and not information about imminent events. If you want information about imminent attacks, you don't put a guy in a cell and deprive him of sleep or blare ear-splittingly loud music at him for weeks, if not months, on end. You want the information before his partners in crime get wind of his capture and change their plans. Therefore, you want information as quickly as possible. Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, disorientation, etc. all take weeks to work (if they work at all, that is), and you like Jack Bauer have only seconds. This ticking bomb argument cannot justify the use of the long term torture techniques that we are now using.

In fact, nothing can. They don't even produce reliable confessions. Even if they did, no court--except, perhaps, Bush's kangaroo military tribunals--would accept them. The only reason why we are using these "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" is because we are really sick fucks.

A quick note to my readers

2008-08-30T19:59:00.003-05:00

I am still alive, but barely. I have a very vicious cold that literally swooped upon me in Olin Library yesterday while translating The Alcibiades I. One second I was perfectly well, and the next second I was sneezing snot all over my Smyth Grammar and my throat suddenly felt as if someone had jammed asbestos down it. I made a point of ignoring Obama's acceptance speech the previous evening. I wonder if this is supernatural payback for not heeding the New Sermon on the Mount.

By the way, readers should know that this cold is so bad that I might as well be radioactive. One may even get sick just by reading this. After all, I am an apostate who has defied the Messiah. I am a contaminant. I should be burned at the stake.

A subscriber of mine asks...

2008-08-23T12:53:00.001-05:00

Is education the best way to fight crime? The short answer is no. The idea that education will make people respect reason and the rule of law was refuted for all time when the best educated people of the twentieth century voted Nazi thugs into power in 1933. Next question.

Thou shalt not take the Lord's Name in vain

2008-08-22T01:24:00.002-05:00

So, what happens now? Will the Catholic Church also bring back the tradition of the stoning penalty for those who dare utter the Tetragrammaton? All I said was that this halibut was good enough for Jehovah. That's all I said.

Oh, I suppose this is a good ruling. Now, I do not have to feel guilty ever again for saying, say,"Goddamn" or the like because God is not God's name. So, I am not taking it in vain. However, if I sing some very sappy St. Louis Jesuit hymn that sounds like a jingle for tampons, I am committing monstrous blasphemy. Well, I already knew that.

Well, goody, the Catholic Church is going to let us cuss with impunity. That's the (very) least she can do after bullshit like this. Some days I really don't like being Catholic. Today is one of them.

Goddamnit!

"if you don't vote, you can't bitch"

2008-08-20T23:54:00.001-05:00

Yeah, well I am not gonna vote in the presidential election. What's the point? I live in Southern Illinois, and Paris Hilton will become a nun before Illinois goes for McCain. Besides it's a law in Illinois that Chicagoans get to vote twice, and we hicks drinking their toilet water get just the same rights as the Chicago dead. We get to vote only once. So, what is the fucking point?

Besides, I do not like either candidate. As I have written before, I cannot vote for Obama because he is a pro-abort wacko. But he opposed the Iraq war, and I am a big anti-war peacenik. So, why can't I just hold my nose on the abortion issue and cast a vote for peace in our time? Well, abortion is not just any issue. Legalized abortion is nothing more than the legalizing of the principle that the weak and powerless have no rights against the strong. I just cannot ignore this for if I did, I would lose my reason for opposing our insane foreign policy which operates upon the very same principle as legalized abortion. There is no difference in kind between killing helpless babies in the womb and bombing defenseless countries. Both are the tyranny of the strong over the weak.

As I have written before, Obama is not a true anti-war candidate. True, he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, but he did not oppose the principle that underpins that war, namely the Doctrine of Preventive War. No, he has repeatedly embraced that principle. He opposed the Iraq War merely because he deems it to be a stupid application of this principle, but with the principle itself, the right to bomb the bejeebers out of anyone that gives us bad vibes, he has no problems at all.

Also, for a man who says he opposed the Iraq War, he sure liked to vote to fund it. He voted against war-funding just one single time, and McCain is, as is well known, all but calling him a traitor for having done so. Anyone that Imperialist Pig calls a traitor should be a friend of mine, but not in this case. Hearing McCain speak, one would think that Obama defiantly cast his vote against war-funding in a tie-dye shirt while having a love-in with Cindy Sheehan. Well, no. Obama is hardly that brave or outrageous. The vote McCain refers to happened in February of last year, and Obama made his no known only after the Dems had already passed every fucking thing which bloodthirsty warmongers like Bush and McCain wanted. Obama cast his vote when it no longer mattered. It was as meaningful as a Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac.

And, of course, Obama wants to rev up our war in Afghanistan, the so-called "Good War" against the evil Taliban who harbored that evil UBL (piss and feces be upon him!). Yeah, well, to fight the Taliban we've had to ally ourselves with the Warlords of the Northern Alliance, drug kingpins who love to bugger and rape little boys and girls. As bad and oppressive as the rule under the Taliban was and in many places still is, it's a Darwinian state of nature under the Warlords. Good War, my pasty white ass! Oh, by the way, the Taliban were prepared to give us UBL if we could show them hard evidence linking him with 9/11. We couldn't, and we still can't.

McCain has always been off the table for me, of course. As I will never tire of saying, he is an Imperialist Pig. He gets his jollies joking about bombing countries with millions of people. This is just sick. McCain is a very sick and demented fuck. He belongs in a rubber room and not in the White House with his senile, doddering hand on the button. Fine, he wants to overturn Roe. Like that will matter diddley shit in the wake of, say, global nuclear anniihilation. What single issue voters just can't get through their thick skulls is that something like global nuclear annihilation renders the right to life null and void, even for the unborn. Yes, I do believe McCain is at least sufficiently insane to trigger an apocalypse.

I have noticed that some pro-lifers have started comparing Obama to Hitler because of the former's pro-abortion stance. This is now a cliche of the pro-life movement: likening legalized abortion to the holocaust. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Fine. I would simply like to point out that Obama at least has not expressed his admiration for a guy full-square behind the eugenic project to rid society of "degenerates" and "morons" and thereby make the world safe for a Master Race. McCain has.

John McCain has said that he is a conservative in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt. Big shocker there. Imperialist pigs admire themselves, but TR was not just an Imperialist Pig. He was also a rabid fan of the American Eugenics Movement. This Movement led to laws that mandated the forced sterilization of those deemed "degenerate" and "moronic". It was the precursor to what happened under Hitler, and, in fact, the influence of American Eugenics upon brutal Nazi science is documented in the minutes of the Nuremberg Trials. TR was an enthusiastic proto-Nazi monster, and it is the putatively pro-life McCain who claims to be of this man's stock. I thought pro-lifers were supposed to denounce eugenics. Go figure.

The choice before me for president is a sick, vile farce, and so I am not going to bother to vote. Many people like to tell me, thinking a slogan passes for a persuasive argument, that if "you don't vote, you can't bitch". Excuse me, but nowhere in the First Amendment do I read that my right of free speech will be abridged or taken away if I do not vote. Geez, the Iraq War was supposed to be about defending our freedoms, but thus far they have been the freedom to detain and torture, the freedom to give no-bid contracts to venal political cronies, the freedom to spy and wiretap, etc, (and the trains and buses aren't even running on time). If we're going to cause all this mayhem for the sake of freedoms, I would like there to be at least one freedom that a poor, unconnected schlub like me can exercise and enjoy, and that is my inalienable and unconditional freedom to bitch whenever I damn well feel like it. Got that? I hope so.

By the way... (a post strictly for Prots)

2008-08-18T13:31:00.003-05:00

Last Friday was the Feast of the Assumption, the day that Catholics (well, Catholics who remember their Catechism, at least) celebrate the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven. It is a very important teaching because it shows that heaven is not just for souls but for the body as well and thereby gives the body transcendent value in contradistinction to the old, hoary gnostic heresy which regards the body as indifferent at best and evil as worst.

Protestants, of course, decry the doctrine of the Assumption as utter heresy. They say it is heretical because there is no Biblical Warrant for it. Well, there is no Biblical Warrant for making tax cuts the centerpiece of a Christian Political Agenda, but that does not seem to bother the Evangelicals in the so-called Christian Coalition.

Besides, there is indeed Biblical warrant for the Assumption. It is recorded in the Book of Revelations that John sees the Covenant in heaven inside the Ark. It cannot be the Old Covenant. That's the Law, and Protestants never miss an opportunity to tell us works-obsessed Catholics that the Law is just an earthy thing, it cannot take us to heaven. So, if the Law is just an earthly matter, it cannot be what John sees in the Kingdom of Grace. So, what John sees must be the New Covenant, and that is none other than the person of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. It specifically says in Holy Writ that John sees the Covenant in the Ark. Okay, so if Christ is the New Covenant, what is the ark that contained Him? The body of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ergo, Mary's body is in heaven. Simple and Biblical if, that is, you believe in the authority of the Bible, and Protestants say they do. So, what's the problem?

The problem is that by saying that Mary was assumed into heaven, the Catholic Church is singling her out for special treatment. All of us other poor schlubs have to struggle through purgatory after we die, if we even get there, and then when we do get to heaven, our souls must wait until the eschaton for the General Resurrection. So, why does Mary get to go to the front of the line? The Catholic Church must think she's the Fourth Person of the Trinity, a goddess, and that's why Protestants say we worship Mary.

Well, that's ridiculous. If the Doctrine of the Assumption says anything at all to our Separated Brethren in Christ, it should say at least this much, that we do not worship Mary. If we really thought Mary was a goddess, then we would believe that she ascended to heaven by her own power. But we don't. Simple grammar will tell you that "to ascend" is in the active voice, "to be assumed" is in the passive voice. Mary is therefore the passive recipient of God's gift, just like every good Protestant is supposed to be. We say that she was assumed by God into heaven, thereby showing conclusively that we believe that Mary is a creature in need of divine power to reach the glorious end of salvation. I am frankly tired of being told that we Catholics worship Mary. That is a know-nothing claim, and the Protestants who make it should re-evaluate their professed commitment to the truth.

And, sure, Mary gets special treatment but not by the Church. God is the one who singled her out to be His mother.

Nota Bene

2008-08-17T22:43:00.003-05:00

By the way, my last post was entirely facetious, okay? That means I do not prefer blowjobs to hugs and kisses. I put that answer down only for the sake of a really cheap laugh. I do not want a blowjob at all because, because it's a form of onanism, and onanism is a mortal sin. Even wanting a blowjob is a mortal sin that will plunge my soul into perpetual perdition, and I don't want that to happen, do I? No, I am a good Catholic, who went to Mass two days in a row this weekend. Honestly, I did. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.

So, fine, no blowjobs for me. Really, I'm good.

Well, okay, the previous post was not ENTIRELY facetious. I do believe in God. But I don't believe in God simply to piss Sam Harris off. I believe in God because, well, because right now I am listening to Shostokovich's preludes and fugues, and they are so fucking beautiful that I refuse to believe that man exists simply to eat, excrete, and then die.

Yeah, I know the Atheist's argument all too well. How the fuck can there be a transcendent, intelligent being who gives a shit for us when little kids are so impoverished, worms squirm out of their eyes, and the Church that claims to serve this allegedly benevolent God cares too much about its gilded tabernacles and hushing up sex scandals to hear the cry of the downtrodden? How can you say with a straight face that the very notion of a good God is compatible with such an evil world that is now paying homage to the country that is funding the raping and pillaging monsters in Darfur? A benevolent God could not have possibly made such warped and crooked timbre.

Fine, if you buy this argument, then you've gotten rid of God but, guess what, the evil still remains. Nice job, Einstein. Ah, but the atheist will respond, once we get rid of the superstition called God, we will no longer have our heads in the clouds, wasting our time with otherworldly fictions, and will at last be able to focus all our energies on finally getting reality right. Oh, really? If humans are indeed so evil that they disprove and therewith destroy the most powerful thing ever imagined, then what makes you think that all of a sudden such destructive power will bring about a utopia of sweetness and light?

I will concede that great evils have been done in the name of God, but for the atheist's argument to work at all he cannot just say this. He must say that every single evil that has ever happened happened because of the God superstition. I will grant the Atheist the Crusades, the Inquisition. I will even for the sake of argument say that Hitler was evil precisely because he was a Catholic. Fine, but all this does not account for all the evil in the history of the world. No, not by a long shot.

Tell me, Atheist, how do you trace the evil of the Soviet Gulags to a belief in God? Or the global sex trade? Do you really want us to believe that every single murder, rape, theft, etc. since the invention of fire happened because the perp had been corrupted by a devotion to God? Do you really think you can sell us the idea that but for the belief of God, no country would bomb hospitals for the sake of oil reserves? That if we just got rid of that silly theological fairy tale, people would stop being the greedy, rapacious, craven, gluttonous assholes that we are now? Besides, Atheist, even if this whopper were somehow true, you'd long be dust before even the conditions for this godless heaven were realized; nearly five billion people or more have to become atheists, after all, and it's a pretty safe bet that this is not going to happen in your lifetime. And you have the temerity to call us theists benighted?

We theists do not need atheists to alert us to the fact of evil. We are all too aware of it. I know I am. I do not know why the benevolent God I profess to believe in allows evil, but I do know that without Him, all I am left with is a life that will end in nothingness, which is the classic metaphysical definition of evil. If there is no eternal God, then everything is the product of nothingness to which it will return. Therefore, everything is evil. But I can look around me and see that evil is not all there is. The music I am listening to right now has already outlived its composer, and I fully expect to hear it if I ever get to heaven. Something that beautiful cannot die. And this is ultimately why I believe in God: I cannot believe in the annihilation of the good.

My mother died when I was an atheist, but I refused to believe as an atheist, that she was now just nothing. My mother was and is not an evil nullity. She was the only woman who ever loved me, and if love is not eternal, it is simply a disposable contingency--like a plastic bag. Putting my hope in an impossible atheist humanist brotherhood of man will not ever bring my mother back. But God can and will, or so I hope. Spero, ergo credo.

A conundrum for Miss Lutheran

2008-08-12T20:19:00.004-05:00

You're a socially conservative Protestant, right? By "socially conservative" I mean, of course, being against such things as legalized abortion, gay "marriage", condom distribution in the schools, etc., and are for more public displays of Christian Religion, the teaching of absolute moral values to the kids, and, perhaps, the systematic elimination of every damned Muslim infidel on the planet.

Now, Miss Lutheran, that above list may not describe your political beliefs exactly, but I know that you do indeed want abortion outlawed, and that alone is enough to get you stuck with the "social conservative" label. You are also a protestant who believes that sin is sin, all sin is equal in the eyes of God. Every sin is rebellion against God, thus every sin is every bit as perverse, depraved, and evil as another. So, the theft of, say, a paperclip is as heinous as, say, the systematic extermination of millions of Jews.

I think this particular Protestant Belief is raving lunacy myself, but it is not the purpose of this post to show that it is indeed raving lunacy (I would think, though, that common sense would be sufficient to demonstrate this). I want to instead put this question to you: in the light of your egalitarian view of all sins, why do you target just one, namely the sin of abortion, for criminalization? If you really believe that all sins are equal, then shouldn't you also be campaigning for the outlawing of swearing, impure thoughts, working on the Sabbath, sassing one's parents, etc., etc. Shouldn't you be up in arms that the penalties for rape are really, really harsh whereas the cops do not even bother to enforce whatever laws there may be against stealing paperclips?

You may well answer as Luther did and explain to me the theory of the Two Kingdoms, one of heaven and the other of earth. And while we are in the latter, we must concern ourselves with its mundane matters, and that includes the law. Because the kingdom of earth if ruled by totally depraved, fallen man, human law cannot match God's will perfectly. So, we must do the best we can do. Since that is especially limited, we should devote ourselves to make sure that law get rids of the really big evils such as murder and not waste our time about the nugatory ones, such as stealing paperclips. Life is too short.

But if man's reason is totally depraved, then the hierarchy of goods and evils will necessarily be fucked. We already know this, of course. Craven natural man thinks in his concupiscently deluded fleshly state that somehow the Nazi Final Solution is really, really dastardly while filching a paperclip is hardly worth even a stutter. And that's because he does not see things as God sees them, and that is why an is an utterly wretched creature who deserves nothing but eternal detention in the Lake of Fire without any right of habeas corpus. Only the utterly gratuitous gift of grace through faith will save the incorrigible fuck-up, and even then he'll be hanging by a fraying thread.

Wouldn't someone saved by grace through faith want to please the God who saved him by striving to know His ways as best he can? You can't do this if you wallow in the dark, blinding cesspool of the never-ending squabble over human laws. Because then you will be forced to judge what things should be outlawed and what things should not. Not only will you be contradicting God's judgement thereby, you will also by the very act of judging itself be setting yourself up as a rival to the only one who is supposed to judge--God, of course, and that is, of course, blasphemy--a sin like any other, to be sure, but just one sin is enough to send your sweet ass to hell.

Of course, Luther has an out for this. Since we are saved by faith alone, it does not matter that we sin or how much we sin just so long as we have faith. Therefore, one can engage in politics and judge just one sin to be the object of the law's wrath just like I can go around fucking females half my age. It does not matter as long as we just believe. Okay, fine. So, that means that in God's eyes campaigning for the outlawing of abortion is not one bit more righteous than the practice of middle-aged lechery. Everything is like filthy rags to Him.

But I suspect you think that involvement in pro-life politics is actually a very good thing and a very selfless, Christian thing to do. You might even think in the dark corners of your prideful Id that it is even--cough, cough--meritorious. Well, if so, then maybe sin is not sin after all for a middle-aged lech like myself--knowing how sick, twist, perverse, and completely fallen he is--at the very least knows that his deeds can in no way ever be regarded as meritorious and therefore is protected from such damnable Romanist arrogance.

Just Some Obvious Thoughts

2008-08-12T05:21:00.002-05:00

So, Hamdan, UBL's driver, got five and a half years. That's pretty much time served and a few months. He'll be out by New Year's--if, that is, Bush abides by the ruling. That's pretty soft for someone who is supposed to be one of the worst of the worst totally depraved, bloodthirsty terrorist monsters of all time, UBL's driver. Two possibilities: 1) Gitmo has been infilitrated by bleeding heart, traitorous card-carrying members of ACLU, a.k.a Al Qaeda in America, who really want the United States to lose the war on terror or 2) Even Bush's own Kangaroo Court doesn't believe his bullshit.

Doesn't expending all this time, energy, and money on a War Crimes Tribunal for a lowly driver whose only crime apparently was carting around UBL to and from dialysis trivialize the very notion of a war crime? Or does this mean we should be deathly afraid of anyone who has simply been in UBL's omnimalignant presence? Gee, I hope our troops track down that vicious motherfucker who dyed UBL's hair. I won't be able to sleep at night until they do. At least, we brought that nefarious chauffeur to justice. Thank God!

In other news, Russia has pre-emptively invaded Georgia. Bad, bad Russia. We must get the U.N. to condemn her because we can't allow a country to invade another country just because it says it feels threatened. Besides, Russia really isn't threatened. It just wants control of the pipeline that runs through Georgia, and wars for control of oil flow are just evil, and... Oh, right. Oops! Nevermind!

Geopolitical karma, baby! Gotta love it!

Absurd

2008-08-10T00:50:00.003-05:00

Okay, so Russia invades Georgia. Another war that will no doubt add to global instability, slaughter lots of people, drive yet more women and girls into sex slavery, and serve as an excuse for speculators to reverse the plunge in oil prices. The Washington Post reported (buried on page 12) that sleep deprivation was still being used at Guantanamo long after the Bushies said they had banned that particular torture back in 2004. For all we know, it probably is still being used. The subprime meltdown continues to turn what once were redoubts of middle-class security into crime-ridden, roach-infested slums, and I am sure that food riots continue all around the world.

So, what was the lead story on the CBS Evening News this past Friday?

Former Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards's Love Child.

No fucking wonder that more and more people are turning to The Daily Show for news.

Thursday evening I watched the premier of The Right to be Left Alone, the new hagiography of that First Amendment Saint and Martyr, Larry Flynt. Yes, a martyr because he was shot for daring to publish a picture of a naked white woman getting it on with a naked black man. Integrated pornography, after all, is a milestone of civil rights.

This alleged documentary did give at least pretense of being "fair and balanced" by giving Gloria Steinem and the late Andrea Dworkin about twenty seconds each to bitch about Flynt's shameless exploitation of women, but, of course, this complaint was immediately followed by an articulate, healthy former porn star who liked her career as a slut and did not feel exploited in the least and was now apparently thriving as a well-dressed corporate executive who obviously does not need the aid of Steinem's victimology to, er, penetrate the glass ceiling. No mention of the high suicide rate or the high rate of drug use and venereal disease in the porn industry. No, just one former pornstar atop the corporate ladder makes the adult industry worthwhile. You can fuck yourselves to the top, too, little girls!

And no mention of Hustler's glorification of its regular cartoon character Chester the (Child) Molester. Because consenting adults should be left alone to prey on children.

But what was really pathetic about this garbage was that Larry Flynt, garbage that he certainly is, was and is right to point out that the mainstream media are nothing but whores for our warmongering plutocracy. Instead of being what it should be, the Fourth Estate that speaks truth to power, it offers us distracting lurid nonsense like stories about Edwards's Bastard Child. Of course, you don't need a loathsome toad like Larry Flynt to make this really obvious point. But doesn't it boggle the mind that journalistic integrity has reached such a nadir, that even the textbook example of the sleazy pimp and pornographer can say with an entirely straight face that he is outraged by how corrupt and craven the mainstream media have become? What is even more mind-boggling is that throngs of people will go to hear him croak out this outrage. Have people become such intellectual serfs that they need to hear what should be self-evident (even to a MySpace teenybopper) confirmed by a filthy fat frog?

Anyway, before I go, I would be very much remiss if I did not stress that Larry Flynt is a monster, and that his magazine is so disgusting that it almost made me vomit. I am not being metaphorical. One of the cartoons was so sick that I literally had to run to the toilet because I feared that I would dirty the floor with vomit.

It is true that Hustler now publishes very serious writings of political journalists such as Nat Hentoff and Gregory Palast, and they should be ashamed of themselves for letting their stuff be seen amid such palpable depravity. The Right to be Left Alone lauds Mr. Flynt as a champion of Free Expression. If allowing such filth to be seen and peddled is the price for living in a free society, then give me a totalitarian dictatorship, please. I do not need Flynt to read trenchant critiques of the Bush Administration and his whores at Fox News and The New York Times. I can read Z-Mag, Harper's, The American Conservative, and The Nation, none of which have any hint of pornography, all of which are much better written (that's not saying much, of course), and all of which because they don't come with a bonus DVD (showing lots and lots of lurid distracting nonsense, by the way) are much, much, much cheaper.

By the way, no one even jokes about reading Hustler for the articles. There is a reason for this. Gregory Palast and Nat Hentoff (among others) are simply casting pearls before sewer-drenched swine. Pathetic.

An Important American Feast Day

2008-08-08T22:14:00.001-05:00

Oh, where are my manners? I forgot to wish everyone a Happy Worship American Power Day, which was two days ago, the 63rd anniversary of our nuking Hiroshima. We just did that to show the world that we are God. You may have heard something different, namely that it was either dropping the bomb or invading Japan, and invading Japan would have cost exponentially more lives than the bomb. In other words, causing a nuclear holocaust was really the humane thing to do because it actually saved lives.

A lot of us Americans still believe this. A lot of us Americans are really, really dumb. First off, Japan was ready to surrender as early as May 8, 1945 and was trying to sue for peace all through the summer. They insisted upon one thing, keeping their Emperor, an entirely ceremonial office. That's it. We, however, insisted upon unconditional surrender. The Japanese could have just asked for a corncob pipe like MacArthur's, and we would have refused. We wanted the Japanese to prostrate themselves before us completely and worship us. We also wanted to show off our new toy to the Soviets. So, Truman ignored the Japanese pleas for surrender and proceeded to usher in the Age of Atomic Annihilation just because he could, and after Japan surrendered, we let them retain their Emperor anyway! Go figure. And now we don't want Iran to have the bomb because, well, those Iranians are not rational like we are. Yeah, right.

Truman, by the way, was a Democrat.

Ah, geez!

2008-08-05T16:01:00.002-05:00

I just now received an angry letter from a subscriber of mine. She is insulted over what I wrote in my current "status": "A wanna-be Socrates is doing what a great majority of the MySpace population can't do. He is reading books." She thinks I mean her. Well, I meant her if and only if she considers herself to be in the great majority of the MySpace population or, to put it another way, the mindless herd. I have looked through countless profiles on MySpace, and more often than not when I scroll down to the book section, I either find it blank or, what is even more discouraging, a very insulting and churlish comment such as, "Reading is for losers," or "Who reads?" Well, such loutish anti-intellectualism is rampant on MySpace as it is in this godforsaken excuse for a country. It's one of the reasons why we have an autistic child with an out-of-whack pituitary gland as president, and if you act like stupid grunts, then you can't expect not to be called stupid grunts. This subscriber wants me to apologize. I just have in the classical sense of apologia. But that's not what she meant, of course. She meant apologize in the modern sense. I am no modernist.

I am, frankly, surprised that I did receive this letter from a regular reader of my weblog. I have always assumed she has read my profile, in which I make it very clear that I really, really love elitism. Elitism, in fact, gives me a hard-on, to be quite honest. Well, the definition of elitism is contempt for hoi poloi, the many, the rabble, the demos, the great majority. This is why no politician wants to be branded as an elitist in a democracy because he does not want to piss off the source of his power, namely the Great Majority. If the Great Majority can't handle the truth, well, then the truth is elitist, and politicians will beat eachother up in a surreal contest over who is better at defying the aloof truth in the name of the common man. But a wanna-be philosopher like me loves the truth, however despised it may be by the unwashed. If the great majority does not like what I write, then let them shove hemlock down my throat.

Now, let me hasten to add that every one of my subscribers is a fellow elitist and, therefore, not a member of the ignorant many. How do I know this? Because they all can read my weblog, of course. As can that woman who sent me the angry letter. I would suggest that this woman, instead of waiting for an apology from me (in the modern sense), review basic set theory (and circular arguments, of course).

Arrogantly yours,

an unabashed elitist.

A Request

2008-08-04T22:30:00.000-05:00

Does anyone, perchance, have the German lyrics to "Der Letzte Tourist in Europa"? If so, would you please be so kind to send them to me? Thanks.